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OPEN Highly efficient light management

for perovskite solar cells
Dong-Lin Wang1, Hui-Juan Cui1, Guo-Jiao Hou2, Zhen-Gang Zhu1,2, Qing-Bo Yan3 & Gang Su1

Organic-inorganic halide perovskite solar cells have enormous potential to impact the existing
received: 14 July 2015
photovoltaic industry. As realizing a higher conversion efficiency of the solar cell is still the most crucial
accepted: 30 November 2015 task, a great number of schemes were proposed to minimize the carrier loss by optimizing the electrical
Published: 06 January 2016 properties of the perovskite solar cells. Here, we focus on another significant aspect that is to minimize
the light loss by optimizing the light management to gain a high efficiency for perovskite solar cells. In
our scheme, the slotted and inverted prism structured SiO2 layers are adopted to trap more light into
the solar cells, and a better transparent conducting oxide layer is employed to reduce the parasitic
absorption. For such an implementation, the efficiency and the serviceable angle of the perovskite
solar cell can be promoted impressively. This proposal would shed new light on developing the high-
performance perovskite solar cells.

Photovoltaic (PV) device with high conversion efficiency and low cost are expected for an extensive utilization of
solar energy. Recently, the emergence of organic-inorganic halide perovskite materials (CH3NH3PbX3, X =  Cl, Br,
I) opens up new possibilities for cost-effective PV modules1–4. In a few short years, the efficiency of perovskite solar
cell has skyrocketed from 3.8% to around 20%5–11. Many strategies are employed to promote the efficiency of the
perovskite solar cells, such as, the interface materials engineering7,12–14, fabrication processing optimization6,15–18,
with or without mesoporous scaffold design19–22, and so on. Those schemes mainly focus on improving the elec-
trical properties of the solar cells to minimize the carrier loss attempting to achieve a high conversion efficiency.
However, an efficient light management is also significant to enhance the efficiency of the solar cells by trapping
more light into the active layers to reduce the light loss. To get high-performance perovskite solar cells, it is quite
essential to balance both the electrical and optical benefits of the cells.
In a simple perovskite solar cell, the active layer (CH3NH3PbI3) is sandwiched between the hole and electron
transport layer (HTL and ETL)6,12,14,23. In such a structure, two electrical benefits, a high collection efficiency and
a low recombination of carriers, are indispensable to realize a high conversion efficiency. Thus, it is necessary to
enhance the material quality of the perovskite to increase the mobility and life times of carriers, and decrease the
defect density. Aside from the material quality, decreasing the thickness of the active layer is also a way to implement
the above mentioned electrical benefits24. Nonetheless, such a thin absorber cannot maintain a high light absorption
to excite adequate carries. Light trapping can provide a perfect solution to absorb more light in the thin active
layer, ultimately, to realize mutual benefits for both optical and electrical properties of the perovskite solar cells.
A typical perovskite solar cell is shown in Fig. 1a, where 80 nm thick ITO (indium doped tin oxide) is
deposited on a flat glass, followed by 15 nm thick PEDOT:PSS (poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(sty-
rene sulfonate)), 5 nm thick PCDTBT (poly(N-9’-heptadecanyl-2,7-carbazole-alt-5,5-(4’,7’-di(thien-2-yl)-2’,1’,
3’-benzothiadiazole))), 350 nm thick CH3NH3PbI3, 10 nm thick PC60BM (((6,6)-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl
ester) and 100 nm thick Ag layer. In this architecture, PEDOT:PSS and PC60BM are considered as HTL and ETL
to extract the excited carriers in the CH3NH3PbI3 layer. Regardless of the carrier loss in the process of transport,
the output current is determined by how much light can be absorbed by the active layer. As shown in Fig. 1b,c,
the absorption and reflection efficiency of each section can be analyzed by employing an optical simulation (the
optical constants of each layers are measured by Q. Lin et al.14). The results indicate that the active layer absorbs
only 65% of the incident light that can be effectively utilized to excite carriers. The light loss of 2% is in the HTL,
ETL and Ag layers, 14% is absorbed by the ITO layer, 4% is reflected by the surface of the glass and 15% escapes
from the solar cell. The first and third losses are hard to suppress. However, the parasitic absorption in ITO layer
and unabsorbed light can be suppressed by an efficient light management. It is worth noting that to excite carriers

1
School of Physics, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. O. Box 4588, Beijing 100049, China. 2School of
Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049,
China. 3College of Materials Science and Opto-Electronic Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing 100049, China. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to G.S. (email: gsu@ucas.ac.cn)

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Figure 1. Illustration and optical properties of a typical perovskite solar cell. (a)The structure of the
perovskite solar cell. (b) The reflection efficiency of the solar cell and glass. (c) The absorption efficiency of each
layer in the solar cell.

there are almost 30% of light that may be reused to excite carriers. To utilize those wasted light, we propose a highly
efficient light management scheme to minimize the light loss in the perovskite solar cell, which mainly consists of
the design of a high-efficient light trapping structure to suppress light reflection and the use of a better ITO layer
to reduce the parasitic absorption.

Results
Design of the high-efficient light trapping structure for perovskite solar cell. Recently, nano-
scaled dielectric and metallic structures based light trapping has been exposed to exhibit excellent capacities to
promote the efficiency of the silicon thin-film solar cells25–28. Nevertheless, the light trapping is hard to collect
all of wavelengths of the utilized light because of the mechanism of the wave optics. It appears that the ray opti-
cal-based light trapping can avoid this issue. What is more, the ray optics-based front retroreflector, back reflector
and structured substrate are proved to be beneficial to enhance the efficiency of the organic solarcells29–33. For
perovskite solar cells, the light trapping structures based on the ray optics may be more appropriate to trap broad-
band sun light and keep low cost benefits. In this work, we propose a cheap light trapping structure based on
the prism structured SiO2 for perovskite solar cells. As shown in Fig. 2a, the prism structured SiO2structuresare
periodically arranged on the top surface of the solar cells. The cross-section of the prism is an equilateral trian-
gular geometry with bottom width L and base angle θ . In the calculation, the size of the width is set large enough
(L =  10 μ m) to minimize the impact of light interference.
In a perovskite solar cell, most of light can be absorbed by the active layer in a single light path when the wave-
length (λ )of the light is short (λ  <  500 nm). In this situation, the main light loss is the reflection at the front surface
of the cell. For the long wavelength (λ  >  500 nm), the unabsorbed light will be reflected back by the bottom Ag
layer. So the reuse of the reflected light is a feasible way to reduce the light loss. For this purpose, a proper designed
prism structure is capable of controlling the light travel path and eliminating the reflected light. Our calculation
indicates that the prism with the base angle θ  =  42° is the best for light trapping. As shown in Fig. 2b, the refraction
and the total internal reflection from the prism side can adjust the light direction to realize at least three times light
injection when the light is incident from I region. Regardless of the light loss at the interface between air and the
prism, the total reflection efficiency (R) of the solar cell can be reduced to RN, where N is the number of times that
the incident light is injected into the active layer. In this case, three times injection of the incident light is enough
to absorb all of the incident light. As a result, the prism based light trapping structures can enhance the absorption
efficiency for the active layer, and reduce the total light reflection with wavelength from 300 nm to 800 nm (as
shown in Fig. 2c). Note that the above optical benefits are only provided by the incident light from I region. The
light trapping by the prism can further be improved by a proper utilization of the incident light from II region.
Based on the above calculation, we find that the averaged total reflection of the perovskite solar cell without
using light trapping structures is below 20%. It is amazing that double reinjection of the incident light by light
trapping structure can suppress the reflection to around 4% (R =  20%, R2 =  4%), which is sufficient to trap most
of incident light into the solar cell. To maximize the light trapping capacity of the prism structure, it is necessary
to reuse the reflected light from both I and II incident regions. Here, we adopt the slotted prism structures with

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Figure 2. Model, light path and optical property of the perovskite solar cell with SiO2 prism light trapping
structures. (a)The model of the perovskite solar cell with SiO2 prism structures. (b) The schematic of the light
ray travel between the prism structures. (c) The absorption efficiency of the perovskite solar cell for total and
the active layer. The light absorption efficiency in the active layer without light trapping structures is taken as a
reference.

Figure 3. Schematic of light trapping induced by slotted SiO2 prism structures and corresponding optical
property of the solar cell. (a) The schematic of the perovskite solar cell with slotted SiO2 prism structures and
traveling path of the incident light from different regions. (b) The absorption efficiency for total and the active
layer. (c) The photo-generated current (JG) as function of the incident angle.

equilateral triangular cross-section, as shown in Fig. 3a, which are located under the prism bottom. The structure
of the perovskite solar cell is conformed to the slotted structures whose size should be properly designed to assure
the reinjection of the reflected light (details can be found in Supplementary Note1).
Figure 3a shows that the optimized prism with slotted structure can realize at least double light injection for all
incident light. The total reflection of the solar cell can be compressed to be under 5% for the light with wavelength
from 300 nm to 750 nm (as shown in Fig. 3b). Thus, the light absorption in the active layer is greatly improved
by the above strategy. For the perovskite solar cell without light trapping structures, JG can reach 18.49 mA/cm2
when light is of normal incidence, while with slotted prism based light trapping structure JG can be increased up
to 21.46 mA/cm2. However, the light trapping ability of the slotted prism is sensitive to the incident angle of the
light, and under oblique incidence of light, the capacity to reuse the reflected light may be degraded. As shown in
Fig. 3c, JG becomes smaller as the oblique angle increases, where JG larger than 20 mA/cm2 can be sustained only

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Figure 4. Schematic of the light trapping induced by SiO2 inverted prism structures and the corresponding
optical property of the perovskite solar cell. (a) The depiction of the SiO2 inverted prism based light trapping
structures. (b) Sketch of the light trapping principle for the inverted prism structure. (c) The absorption
efficiency with inverted prism (base angle θ  =  42°) for total and the active layer. (d) JG with proposed light
trapping structure as function of the incident angle.

when the oblique angle is less than 30°. Obviously, this small angle cannot satisfy the requirement of sufficient
utilization of sun light for a solar cell without a tracking system.
A large serviceable angle of incident light and a high capacity of light trapping are preferable for a better light
trapping scheme. Here, the SiO2 inverted prism structure is employed for the perovskite solar cell to achieve the
above two purposes. As shown in Fig. 4a, the structure of the perovskite solar cell is conformed to the side of the
inverted prism, and sun light is incident from the bottom of the prism. In this structure, the unabsorbed light after
the first injection can be reused by properly utilizing the total internal reflection of the prism bottom when the light
is obliquely incident (see Fig. 4b). However, the double injection of the incident light into the active layer can be
sustained only when the light is within a serviceable angle determined by the base angle of the prism. This angle
is defined by α  <  arcsin (nglass·sin(2θ –θ c)) for θ  ≤  θ c and α  =  90° for θ  >  θ c, where nglass is the reflective index of the
glass and θ c ≈  41.5° is the critical angle for total reflection of light from glass to air (more details can be found in
Supplementary Note2). It can be seen that the high-efficient light tapping can be sustained for all oblique angles
by employing the inverted prism with base angle θ  ≥  42°.
Now let us look at the optical properties of the perovskite solar cell with the inverted prism (base angle θ  =  42°)
light trapping structure. In this strategy, the double injection caused by the prism of the incident light can promote
the average total absorption to approach 95% for broad band wavelengths when the light is in normal incidence
(see Fig. 4c). The enhancement of the light absorption in the active layer can enhance JG to around 21.01 mA/cm2.
More importantly, this optical benefit can be maintained within a large serviceable angle. As shown in Fig. 4d, JG
larger than 20 mA/cm2can be sustained when the oblique angle is within about 60°. However, the light trapping
ability is degraded when the incident angle is larger than this serviceable angle due to the increased reflection at the
front surface of the glass and one side of the inverted prism structure. It is interesting to note that this serviceable
angle is double that of the perovskite solar cell with slotted prism based light trapping structure.

Reducing the parasitic absorption in ITO layer. The designed light trapping structures are capable of
suppressing the total reflection to approach the limitation (R ≈  5%) that only contains the reflection at the front
surface of the glass for broad band wavelength. However, a large parasitic absorption in the ITO layer still wastes
much of trapped light in proposed perovskite solar cells. On the other hand, improving the material quality of the
ITO layer is another viable way to enhance the light absorption in the active layer. The ITO layer studied in this
work is based on the commercial ITO patterned glass electrodes (Kintec), whose optical constants were measured
elsewhere14. Our calculation indicates that the transparent efficiency of this ITO layer with 80 nm thickness is
around 85%, which is insufficient for a high-performance perovskite solar cell. Furthermore, the material quality
of the ITO layer is associated with different manufacturing processes. Previous studies have reported the optical
properties of the ITO based on ITO-glass (MERCK, Germany)34, suggesting that this ITO has better transparency

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Figure 5. Light absorption for the perovskite solar cell with two proposed light trapping structures and the
use of the better material quality of the ITO layer. (a) The absorption efficiency of the solar cell with slotted
prism and better ITO layer for total and the active layer. (b) The absorption efficiency of the solar cell with
inverted prism and better ITO layer for total and the active layer.

and lower absorption than that for the ITO based on Kintec. Thus, we replace the ITO used in our previous cal-
culation with this better ITO to compress the parasitic absorption in the ITO layer.
As shown in Fig. 5a, the replacement of the better ITO has a slight influence on the total absorption of the
perovskite solar cell with slotted prism based light trapping structure, but the light absorption in the active layer
is promoted highly due to the reduced parasitic absorption in the ITO layer. In other words, the light loss caused
by reflection and parasitic absorption can be minimized by employing the slotted prism based light trapping and
a better ITO layer. JG of the so-designed perovskite solar cell can be improved to reach 23.92 mA/cm2, about 30%
larger than that for the solar cell without light management. In addition, the perovskite solar cell with the better
ITO layer and the inverted prism structure also has a remarkable capacity to promote the averaged absorption in
the active layer to exceed 90% (see Fig. 5b). The utilization of the better ITO only adjusts the internal absorption
in different layers of the solar cell, and has a little influence on the total optical benefits induced by the proposed
light trapping schemes, so the large serviceable angle for the perovskite solar cell with inverted prism based light
trapping structure can still be sustained.

Electrical performance of the solar cell with proposed light management strategies. Above
studies indicate that the optical properties of the perovskite solar cells can be optimized by invoking the proposed
light management schemes. We now explore their electrical properties by implementing an electrical simulation
calculation. For a reference, we first implement the simulation on a flat perovskite solar cell without light manage-
ment. We assume that all absorbed light can be transformed into carriers, and the generation rate (G) of the car-
riers can be approached by the previous optical calculations. Figure 6a shows G profiles of the flat perovskite solar
cell for the normal incident light at wavelength 400 nm, 500 nm, 600 nm and 700 nm. At the short wavelength, the
light cannot penetrate through the active layer, so the carriers are generated only at the top region of the active
layer. Meanwhile, the recombination of the carriers mainly occurs in the region where the carriers are abundant.
As the wavelength increases, the light can reach to the bottom Ag layer and be reflected back, which leads to the
carriers appearing in the whole region of the active layer. The recombination rate (U) of the carriers in the regions
close to the carrier extracting layers is larger than that in the middle region of the active layer. However, more
generally, the order of the magnitude of G is larger than that of U for the incident light with all wavelengths. If the
loss of extraction of carriers is disregarded, the calculated internal quantum efficiency (IQE) of the flat perovskite
solar cell can reach to 100% (see Fig. 6b), which is consistent with the previous experiment14. Such a perfect IQE
is mainly due to the extremely low U of the perovskite solar cell, which is associated with high material quality of

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Figure 6. Profiles of the generation (G) and recombination (U) rate of the carriers in the flat perovskite
solar cell and the corresponding internal and external quantum efficiency (IQE and EQE) of the solar cell.
(a) The profiles of log(G) and log(U) of the flat perovskite solar cell without light management. (b) The IQE and
EQE of the flat perovskite solar cell.

Figure 7. Current-voltage (I-V) curve for the perovskite solar cells with different light management
schemes. The current-voltage curve for the flat perovskite solar cell without light management is taken as a
reference.

the perovskite with long life time and high mobility of the carriers6,14,35–38. Optimization of the production process
to obtain the material with high quality is certainly the most direct route to maintain the best electrical benefit of
the perovskite solar cell.
In fact, the distribution of the carrier generation in the solar cell is significantly changed when the light trap-
ping structure is applied. Such a change would affect the electrical performance of the solar cell, in particular the
recombination of carriers, IQE, EQE and so on. In our simulation, as indicated, the IQE of the solar cell is not
changed when the light management is implemented. This result is obtained on an assumption that the proper-
ties of materials involved in the solar cell are independent. In this work, we only focus on optimizing the optical
property of the solar cell and estimating the potential of the electrical performance improvement brought by the
light management. In order to simplify the calculations, we ignore the structural scattering by taking the period
of the light trapping structure width as large as L =  10 μ m in the optical calculation, and assume that the optical
and electrical performances of the solar cell are independent in electrical simulations.
High-efficient light management schemes proposed here can offer the best optical benefits for the perovskite
solar cell, but the folding regions in the proposed light trapping structures can bring undesirable crystal defects
that may increase the recombination of the carriers, and may also degrade the material quality of the perovskite,
including life time and mobile of the carriers. To facilitate the investigation how much the optical benefit gained
by light management can be transformed into the electrical benefit, the defects in folding regions are regardless to
simplify calculations, even if this issue is important for the perovskite solar cell. Here, we suppose that the employ-
ment of the light management is independent of the electrical properties of the materials, and IQE =  100% for the
perovskite solar cell is applicable for all proposed schemes.
By implementing the electrical simulation, the current-voltage (I–V) curve of the perovskite solar cell with
different light management schemes can be achieved (see Fig. 7). Table 1 shows the basis electrical properties of
the proposed perovskite solar cells, including short circuit current density (Jsc), the open circuit voltage (Voc), the

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Jsc(mA/cm2) Voc(V) FF(%) Efficiency(%)

Flat glass 18.49 1.02 85.53 16.13
Slotted prism 21.46 1.03 85.46 18.89
Inverted Prism 21.01 1.03 85.35 18.47
Slotted prism
23.92 1.03 85.88 21.16
and better ITO
Inverted prism
23.47 1.03 85.84 20.75
and better ITO

Table 1. The short circuit current density (Jsc), the open circuit voltage (Voc), the filling factor (FF) and the
conversion efficiency of the perovskite solar cells with different light management schemes.

Figure 8. Conversion efficiency of the perovskite solar cells with different light management schemes.

filling factor (FF) and the conversion efficiency. The calculated Voc =  1.02 and the efficiency with 16.13% for the
perovskite solar cell deposited on a flat glass is very close to the previous experimental results14. By employing
slotted and inverted prism based light trapping structures, Jsc can be promoted to 21.46 mA/cm2and 21.01 mA/
cm2, respectively. Consequently, the conversion efficiency of the perovskite solar cells with two proposed light
trapping structures can achieve 18.89% and 18.47%, respectively. The performance of the perovskite solar cells can
be further improved by using a better ITO layer. As a result, for the perovskite solar cell with above two designed
light trapping structures and better ITO layers, Jsc can reach to 23.92 mA/cm2 and 23.47 mA/cm2, and the efficiency
can achieve to 21.16% and 20.75%, respectively. One may see that the maximal efficiency of the perovskite solar
cell with designed light management schemes can exceed the previous reported values, which is 31.2% larger than
that for the perovskite solar cell without light management.
The above calculations are implemented when the light is in normal incidence. Here, we examine the incident
angle dependence for the perovskite solar cells with different light management schemes. When the light is in
oblique incidence, the profile of G and U in the perovskite solar cell will be changed as the oblique angles increase.
To study the impact of those changes on the electrical performance of the solar cell, we calculate the IQE of the
perovskite solar cell with the designed slotted prism structure when the oblique angle of the light is at 20°, 40°, 60°
and 80°. The results indicate that the IQE =  100% can be sustained for all above cases. The reasons may be that the
perovskite material itself has a very low U for carrier and a larger G far greater than U, even if the solar cell is under
different light conditions. Based on above investigations, we calculate the conversion efficiency of the perovskite
solar cell by assuming that the IQE is independent of the oblique angle of the light.
As shown in Fig. 8, the maximum efficiency of the perovskite solar cells without light management can be found
to approach 16.9% when the incident angle around the Brewster’s angle (~50°). For the slotted prism employed
perovskite solar cell, the enhancement of the efficiency can be sustained for all oblique angles. However, an obvious
decrease of the efficiency appears when the incident angle is between 30° and 65° due to the degradation of the light
trapping ability induced by the slotted prism structures. By employing the better ITO layer, the averaged efficiency
of the solar cell with slotted prism structure can reach 19.66% for the incident angle less than 80°. Moreover, the
efficiency of the so-designed solar cell larger than 20% can be maintained when the incident angle within 22°. To
enlarge the serviceable angle of the perovskite solar cell, we also propose another light trapping scheme that is
based on the inverted prism structures. In such a scheme, an obvious enhancement of the efficiency of the solar
cell can be obtained when the incident angle is less than 60°. It is surprising that the efficiency of the solar cell with
the inverted prism structure and the better ITO layer can exceed 20% for all oblique angles from 0° to 50°. If the
oblique angle is larger than the Brewster’s angle (~50°), the reflection at the front surface of the glass and the side
of the inverted prism will increase quickly to degrade the light trapping capacity. Overall, by implementing our
light management strategies, the maximum efficiency larger than 21% can be obtained by employing the slotted
prism and the better ITO layer, and a larger serviceable angle exceeding 50° can be achieved by employing the
inverted prism and the better ITO layer.

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In general, our investigation indicates that the performance of the perovskite solar cell highly depends on the
ITO layer and its architectural structure. For a flat perovskite solar cell, the highest value of Jsc can exceed 22 mA/cm2
in some experiments. In this work, the calculated Jsc of a planar structure greater than 21 mA/cm2 can be obtained
by eliminating the light waste in the ITO layer. Our calculation is pretty close to the experimental results. Although
the experimental work already achieves a high Jsc in a planar structure, the architectural structure optimization in
our work can further promote the Jsc of the perovskite solar cell to around 24 mA/cm2.

Discussion
To achieve high-performance perovskite solar cells, we proposed high-efficient light management schemes to opti-
mize the optical properties of the cells, which includes the design of light trapping structure to suppress the total
light reflection and employs the better ITO layer to reduce the parasitic absorption. By implementing a full field
optical and electrical simulation on the designed perovskite solar cells, we discover that the slotted and inverted
prism SiO2 structure exhibit better capacities to trap light into the cells. With the properly designed two structures,
the total reflection can be compressed to below 5%, and the larger serviceable angle can be achieved for the cell
with an inverted prism structure. Based on the proposed light trapping structures, the light absorption in the active
layer can be further improved by employing the better ITO layer to reduce the parasitic absorption. The calculated
conversion efficiency of the perovskite solar cell with the slotted prism structure and the better ITO layer can
approach to an impressive value of 21.16%, being 31.2% larger than that for the solar cell without light management.
In addition, another light management strategy that includes the inverted prism structure and the better ITO layer
can promote the efficiency of the perovskite solar cell to exceed 20% within a large serviceable angle (~50°). We
would like to stress that the proposed structures are feasible to fabricate by laser microlithography. Moreover, the
extra cost for constructing proposed structures will not shake the price advantage of the perovskite solar cells. The
schemes proposed in this work will provide useful guides for developing high-performance perovskite solar cells.

Methods
The optical and electrical properties of the solar cell are studied by employing a full field optical and electri-
cal simulation method that involve a self-consistent calculation of Maxwell, Poisson, and carrier transport
equations39–41. When the feature size of the solar cell is in tens of micrometers, the geometric ray tracing
method is indeed an efficient way to calculate the total reflection and absorption of the solar cell. However,
this method is hard to calculate the optical absorption in each layer of the solar cell. In order to analyze the
detailed property of the light distribution in each layer of the solar cell, Maxwell equation based method is
employed in our work. The optical performance simulation is implemented by solving Maxwell’s equations
in a Finite Element Method (FEM) software package39. Because the prism based light trapping structure is
asymmetrical in x and z directions, both the transverse electric (TE) and the transverse magnetic (TM) polar-
ized incident light are considered. The final calculations give the averaged results for TE and TM modes. All
of optical calculations are executed under a normal incidence unless specified. The complex optical constants
for all layers in proposed perovskite solar cell are taken from previous experimental works14. The better ITO
layer is adopted from the previous report34. By performing the optical simulation, we can obtain the optical
absorption in each layer of the solar cell, which is given by:

ωε′′ E (λ) 2
A (λ) = ∫ 2
dV ,
(1)

where E ( r , λ) is the distribution of the electric field intensity at each single wavelength in each layer, ε′′ is the
imaginary part of permittivity of the materials, ω is the angular frequency of the incident light. The optical benefits
of the solar cell can beassessed by the density of photo-generated current (JG) given by42:
A (λ) Pam1.5 (λ) λ
JG = q ∫ hc
dλ ,
(2)
where q is the charge of an electron, c is the speed of light, h is the Planck constant, Pam1.5(λ ) is the spectral photon
flux density in solar spectrum (AM 1.5). By assuming that the absorbed light are all used to excite carriers, the
generation profile of the carriers can be described by

ε′′ E (λ) 2
G (λ) = Pam1.5 (λ) ⋅ .
2 (3)
The electrical performance of the solar cell is simulated by solving Poisson’s equation and carriers transport equa-
tions in the FEM software package39. For simplifying the calculation, only direct and Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH)
recombinations are considered. The corresponding coefficients of life time and radiative recombination coeffi-
cient are taken from refs 6,35,43. The trap energy level is set as Et =  Ei +  0.7 eV to fit the Voc value in the previous
experiment14, where Ei is the intrinsic Fermi energy of the CH3NH3PbI3. Besides, 6.4 Ω cm2 series resistance and
1.6 kΩ cm2 shunt resistance are applied to the model for calculating the I-V curve of the perovskite solar cell44.
Other basis parameters of the perovskite solar cell are taken from previous studies6,45.
This self-consistent method has been proved to be an effective way to calculate the optical and electrical
properties of the solar cells39. A proper choice of parameters used in calculations is crucial to realize an
accurate and reliable simulation. For a perovskite solar cell, the material parameters are related to the fab-
rication process. The material parameters used in our calculation are taken from typical experimental and
theoretical studies.

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Acknowledgements
The authors are benefitted from useful discussions with Z.C. Wang and Q.R. Zheng. This work is supported in
part by the MOST of China (Grant No. 2012CB932900 and No. 2013CB933401), the NSFC (No. 11474279), the
Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB07010100), and the
China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2014M550805). Z.-G. Zhu is supported by Hundred Talents Program of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Scientific Reports | 6:18922 | DOI: 10.1038/srep18922 9

www.nature.com/scientificreports/

Author Contributions
D.-L.W. and G.S. conceived the project. D.-L.W. designed and executed the simulations. D.-L.W. and G.S. prepared
and contributed to the editing of the manuscript. H.-J.C., G.-J.H., Z.-G.Z. and Q.-B.Y. discussed the results and
commented on the manuscript.

Additional Information
Supplementary information accompanies this paper at http://www.nature.com/srep
Competing financial interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests.
How to cite this article: Wang, D.-L. et al. Highly efficient light management for perovskite solar cells. Sci. Rep.
6, 18922; doi: 10.1038/srep18922 (2016).
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Scientific Reports | 6:18922 | DOI: 10.1038/srep18922 10