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In addition, the scattered light with angles larger than the critical angle of the front interfaces can be trapped inside the Si due to total internal reflection. The rear nanoparticles also can enhance the light path lengths by scattering. The front nanoparticles can both reduce the light reflection at the front surface due to the optical impedance matching and the light path length increase particularly for the longer wavelengths as a result of the scattering induced angular redistribution of the incident light. 1b and 1c identify, respectively, the ultra-thin solar cells with the light trapping nanoparticles located on the front surface of the SiN x ARC and embedded in a SiO 2 dielectric layer positioned between the Si wafer and the Al back reflector. An optically thick Al back reflector is located underneath the wafer. 75 nm is the optimized thickness for SiN x as an ARC layer. 1a shows the thick 180 μm solar cell with a standard configuration (cell without nanoparticles) used throughout this study, consisting of a 75 nm SiN x antireflection coating (ARC) layer on the surface of a Si wafer. These results demonstrate the feasibility and prospect of achieving high-efficiency ultra-thin silicon wafer cells with plasmonic light trapping.įig. This represents a 97% material saving with only 15% relative efficiency loss. Nanoparticle integrated ultra-thin solar cells with only 3% of the current wafer thickness can potentially achieve 15.3% efficiency combining the absorption enhancement with the benefit of thinner wafer induced open circuit voltage increase. In this paper we demonstrate that, using the advanced light trapping strategy with a properly designed nanoparticle architecture, the wafer thickness can be dramatically reduced to only around 1/10 of the current thickness (180 μm) without any solar cell efficiency loss at 18.2%. Reducing the silicon wafer thickness at a minimized efficiency loss represents a mainstream trend in increasing the cost-effectiveness of wafer-based solar cells. The cost-effectiveness of market-dominating silicon wafer solar cells plays a key role in determining the competiveness of solar energy with other exhaustible energy sources.