The structural effects on performance of a lateral AlGaAs/GaAs quantum well solar cell

This paper introduces a novel lateral quantum well solar cell, and investigates the effects of structural parameters of these nanostructures on the device's performance. For modeling the device, first, the absorption coefficients and the reflectance parameters of the device at different regions were calculated. Those parameters were then used to find the system's optical generation rate. Finally, while considering all the radiative and non-radiative recombinations, the continuity and drift-diffusion equations were solved to find the dark- and photo-currents. The results indicated that applying quantum wells to the traditional classical solar cells could noticeably increase the system's efficiency. Additionally, it was found that efficiency was heavily dependent on the values of different geometrical parameters, including the active layer's thickness and the width of the wells and barriers. Moreover, it was shown that modifying some structural parameters such as the barrier mole fraction could noticeably influence the solar cell's characteristics. Therefore, to obtain good efficiency it is necessary to optimize these parameters.