Controlling the Recombination Activity of Dislocations in III-V Solar Cells

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Existing III-V manufacturing methods, such as epitaxial liftoff, that attempt to reuse costly III-V and germanium substrates over many growth cycles are too expensive to enable manufacturing at scale. One way to overcome this issue is to grow them on low-cost substrates such as silicon. This team will perform the first systematic study of III-V solar cells grown on silicon surfaces decorated with beryllium, carbon, germanium, tellurium, and other impurities in order to identify conditions that will render dislocations and other structural defects less harmful to solar cell performance. Reducing the impact of defects would improve device performance and enable the use of low-cost growth substrates in the fabrication of high-performance III-V cells and modules.

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