Graphene Based Schottky Barrier Solar Cells

Abstract

The experimental isolation of graphene by micromechanical cleavage of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) has stimulated much experimental and theoretical research. In the last few years, a great deal of work has been dedicated to test how the theoretical predictions match the experimentally determined properties of graphene. Recent works have shown that graphene sheets (GS) deposited on n-type Si wafer to give Schottky barrier solar cells (SBSC) allow to achieve efficiencies up to 1.5%. Our paper reports a study about the final performances of graphene-on-semiconductor Schottky junction solar cells showing the potentiality of this kind of device. A generalized equivalent circuit model of graphene based SBSC is presented to simulate the device behavior: the circuital parameters used in the model are strictly dependent on the physical properties of the GS and of the semiconductor which form the Schottky junction. Electrical Capacitance- Voltage (CV) characterization performed on some “ad hoc” realized structures, have been used to obtain the experimental value of some important physical parameters used in the calculations.