Abstract
In the conventional crystalline silicon heterojunction solar cell with the intrinsic thin layer structure (the HIT solar cell), a p-doped thin film silicon or its alloy (pDTF-Si/A) is used as the hole collecting window layer. However, the parasitic absorbance in the pDTF-Si/A window layer, and the toxic, explosive diborane gas used for p-doping are limiting factors for achieving HIT cells with reduced processing costs and / or higher efficiencies. In this work, pDTF-Si/A is replaced by V2Ox, which is deposited by a simple physical vapor deposition technique. Due to the wide band gap of V2Ox, the HIT solar cell with the V2Ox window layer generates a higher short-circuit current density than the reference conventional HIT cell under 1 sun, and achieves an open-circuit voltage of 0.7 V. Furthermore, the charge carrier lifetime and pseudo-efficiency values of the HIT solar cell with the V2Ox window layer indicate that this cell has the potential to outperform the conventional HIT cell in terms of the power conversation efficiency under the standard test conditions.