Large lateral photovoltaic effect in µc-SiOx:H/a-Si:H/c-Si p–i–n structure

In this paper, we report on a large lateral photovoltaic effect (LPE) in a hydrogenated microcrystal silicon-oxygen (mu c-SiOx:H)-based p-i-n structure. Compared with LPE in a hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H)-based p-i-n structure, this structure showed an abnormal current-voltage (I-V) curve with a lower photoelectric conversion efficiency, but exhibited a much higher LPE with the highest position sensitivity of 64.3 mV/mm. We ascribe this to the enhancement of the lateral gradient of excess transmitted carriers induced by increasing both Schottky barrier and p-type layer body conductivity. Our results suggest that this mu c-SiOx:H-based p-i-n structure may be a promising candidate for position-sensitive detectors (PSDs). Moreover, our results may also imply that solar cell devices with abnormal I-V curves (or low efficiency) could find their new applications in other aspects. (C) 2016 The Japan Society of Applied Physics