A simple optical properties modeling of microcrystalline silicon for the energy conversion application by the effective medium approximation method

Abstract

The optical properties of microcrystalline silicon (mu c-Si) were estimated using the effective medium approximation (EMA) method. This modeling was based on two-phase mixture, amorphous silicon (a-Si) and crystalline silicon (c-Si) with Volume fractions of f(a) and f(c) respectively. It could be possible to understand that mu c-Si has lower light absorption characteristics than a-Si over all solar spectrum by considering hydrogen involvement in embedded a-Si part of mu c-Si and crystalline volume fraction. It is proposed that p-type mu c-Si is superior to n-type mu c-Si because of its high optical gap of E-04 and its low absorption coefficient spectrum shape.