Engineering Commons^™

Exchanging Ohmic Losses In Metamaterial Absorbers With Useful Optical Absorption For Photovoltaics, Ankit Vora, Jephias Gwamuri, Nezih Pala, Anand Kulkarni, Joshua M. Pearce, Durdu Ö. Güney

Joshua M. Pearce

Using metamaterial absorbers, we have shown that metallic layers in the absorbers do not necessarily constitute undesired resistive heating problem for photovoltaics. Tailoring the geometric skin depth of metals and employing the natural bulk absorbance characteristics of the semiconductors in those absorbers can enable the exchange of undesired resistive losses with the useful optical absorbance in the active semiconductors. Thus, Ohmic loss dominated metamaterial absorbers can be converted into photovoltaic near-perfect absorbers with the advantage of harvesting the full potential of light management offered by the metamaterial absorbers. Based on experimental permittivity data for indium gallium nitride, we have shown …