Impact of doping on InAs/GaAs quantum-dot solar cells: A numerical study on photovoltaic and photoluminescence behavior

We investigate the effect of doping on quantum dot (QD) solar cells by analysing their behavior in terms of photovoltaic characteristic, external quantum efficiency, and photoluminescence (PL) at room temperature. The analysis addresses the two most widespread methods for QD selective doping, namely modulation and direct doping, to gain a comprehensive device-level assessment of the impact of doping profile and density on the solar cell behavior. Devices are simulated using a physics-based model that accurately describes QD carrier dynamics within a semi-classical drift-diffusion-Poisson model. Different scenarios in terms of crystal quality are considered: in the high-quality material, close to radiative limit, large open circuit voltage recovery is predicted, due to the suppression of radiative recombination through QD ground state. In the defective material, significant photovoltage recovery is also attained owing to the suppression of both nonradiative and QD ground state radiative recombination. In both cases, PL emission from extended wetting layer states becomes dominant at high doping density. The interplay between nonradiative and QD radiative recombination channels, and how their interaction is modified by doping, are analyzed in detail. Strong influence on the cell behavior of unintentional background doping of interdot layers and markedly nonlinear behavior of open circuit PL with respect to excitation intensity are demonstrated. The resulting picture provides new insight on the experimental results in literature.