5% to date [4]. Another promising way for facilitating carrier collection is to fabricate nanostructure-based hybrid solar cells that use CDK inhibitor ordered semiconductor nanowire

array (NWA) surrounded by photoactive organics. Benefitted from the ease of fabrication and cost-effectiveness, Si NWA is utilized to form P3HT/Si NWA hybrid solar cells. Over standard hybrid solar cells, it is expected that the Si NWA-based solar cells have the following advantages: On the electrical side, due to high carrier mobility and small dimensions, the Si NWA offers straight pathways for the carriers to escape the device as quickly as possible [5]. On the optical side, the light absorption is extend to infrared below the bandgap of silicon, thereby check details more photons in the solar radiation can be harvested. Meanwhile, due to their sub-wavelength dimensions, the strong light trapping effects arising from light scattering, light guiding, and inherent antireflection properties make NWA constructed hybrid solar cells absorb more photons with less material consumption as compared with conventional planar structure [6–10].

Because of these advantages, researches focusing on hybrid solar cells of P3HT/Si NWA have been done by many groups [11, 12]. In the past few years, the reported devices’ performances Selleck Fosbretabulin have been improved, but the published PCE of P3HT/Si NWA solar cells are still low. From the published

reports of other inorganic semiconductor solar cells based on NWA, the property, especially optical absorptivity, of the photovoltaic device depends critically on the geometry Carbachol of the sub-wavelength NWA structure [13–15]. The absence of properly optimized structure may be the main reason for the low PCE of the proposed hybrid solar cells. Thus, before practical fabrication of P3HT/Si NWA hybrid solar cells, the geometry of P3HT/Si NWA must be optimized. In view of this, in this paper, we do an optical simulation about P3HT/Si NWA hybrid solar cells to explore the optical characteristics of the system, so as to give an optical guidance for the practical fabrication of P3HT/Si NWA hybrid solar cells. Methods In this paper, an optical simulation about P3HT/Si NWA hybrid solar cells was investigated to explore the optical characteristics of the system. First, the influence of the thickness of P3HT on the optical absorption of solar cells has been thoroughly analyzed by using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method [16]. Second, to further understand the optical absorption of the system, the optical generation rates in the x-z cross section of hybrid P3HT/Si NWA under optimized coated and uncoated Si NWA were obtained.