Ultrafast Laser Processing Of Silicon For Photovoltaics

The photovoltaics market has been growing rapidly in the past decade or so, driven by policy support, growing economies of scale, and technological improvements. Continued advances in photovoltaics manufacturing and technologies may drive further cost reductions and facilitate market growth going forward. Here, we review one such potential advance: the use of ultrafast laser processing in silicon photovoltaic production. We provide an overview of the current major capabilities of ultrafast laser processing of silicon, including texturing, hyperdoping, and combined texturing and hyperdoping. We describe each process, survey recent advances, compare to alternative methods, and report the state-of-the-art of each process in relation to photovoltaic devices. We also discuss the major challenges facing each process. We close with a prospectus for research and applications. We conclude that there are no major technical obstacles to the application of ultrafast laser texturing to photovoltaics manufacturing currently, while ultrafast laser hyperdoping requires further research and development before adoption. We also show that the use of hyperdoping for intermediate band silicon photovoltaics likely requires concurrent surface texturing or other absorption-enhancement techniques to yield photoconversion efficiency improvements.