Investigation of Plasmonic Resonances in Metal Nanoparticle Embedded CdS/CdTe Solar Cells

The addition of embedded metal (Au, Ag) nanoparticles in CdS/CdTe thin film solar cells has been shown to exhibit enhancement in the solar cell efficiency in our previous studies using pulsed laser deposition techniques. In this study we theoretically investigate the effects of these metal and semiconductor nanoparticles (Si, SiGe) on enhancement of plasmonic resonances for these photovoltaic materials. This is done through the use of computational simulation programs by designing thin films of the same structure with embedded metal and semiconductor nanoparticles. The purpose of this study is to vary size and coverage of the CdS/CdTe interface and computationally calculate the effect of these variations on the plasmonic resonances and thus solar cell efficiencies. These computational results process will be used as a pre-cursor to the experimental process of embedded nanoparticles into CdS/ CdTe through the method of Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD).