Artificial Metamaterials for High Efficiency Silicon Solar Cells

The reduction of the significant optical losses due to the reflection and the increase of the penetration of the solar photons into the silicon initiated the development of new photoelectrical techniques for silicon solar cells. Insertion of metamaterials in solar cells seems to be one of the interesting approaches owing to the promising properties of these news materials. Metamaterials are a class of man-made subwavelength structured composite materials. Metamaterials with their unusual electromagnetic properties allow unprecedented guiding of the incident light. In this paper, we undertake a numerical study of the optical response of a multilayer planar waveguide structure based on metamaterials for silicon solar cells. The structure comprises three layers embedded in air. The metamaterial layer is sandwiched between a glass layer and a silicon layer. We first analyze the electromagnetic parameters of the