Recombination in highly injected silicon

Recent advances in solar cells designed to operate under high-level injection conditions have produced devices that are approaching some of the limits imposed by the fundamental band-to-band Auger recombination in Silicon. A device has been optimized to study this recombination by using the fabrication technology developed for point-contact solar cells. Using both steady-state and transient measurements, the recombination rates in high-resistivity Si in the injected carrier density range of 10 ¹⁵ to 2 × 10 ¹⁷ carriers / cm ³ were investigated. The coefficient of the recombination, which depends on the carrier density cubed, is found to be 1.66 × 10 ^-30 cm ⁶ /s ± 15 percent. This result is four times higher than the ambipolar Auger coefficient commonly used in the modeling of devices that operate in this injected carrier density range and lowers the expected limit efficiencies for silicon solar cells.