Luminescence imaging for quantitative solar cell material and process characterization

Electro (EL) and photoluminescence (PL) imaging are rather new methods for fast spatially resolved characterization of the electrical properties of crystalline silicon solar cells. EL imaging is experimentally quite simple. Unfortunately in general a quantitative evaluation of the diode quality is not possible, but is limited to very low quality devices. Conversely, PL imaging is experimentally more challenging but allows also a quantitative evaluation of the diode quality for state-of-the-art devices. Experimentally the two techniques are compared analyzing two differently processed solar cells made of multi crystalline sister wavers.