Today human beings are suffering energy crisis. One possible solution is to get solar power directly from the sun by creating highly efficient solar cells at a low cost. Through this study, we demonstrated the feasibility of the hybrid solar cells, combining silicon nanowires and PEDOT polymer. The main advantage of such a structure is the simplicity to both the structure of silicon and the deposition of PEDOT, using efficient and low-cost methods of metal-assisted chemical etching (EMACE) and electrochemical deposition. The silicon nanowires (SiNWs) array becomes an active research subject nowadays in photovoltaic application mainly due to its good light trapping effect. The etched SiNWs obtained can reach a reflection lower than 3% in the whole visible range. The areal density of SiNWs in array can be tuned by KOH tapering process. Besides core-shell junction in Si nanowire is effective in photogenerated carriers' collection. It is first time, to our knowledge, that the polymer PEDOT is electrochemically polymerized with etched SiNWs as electrode, and a real core-shell junction wrapping individual silicon nanowire can be realized. The core-shell morphology is dependent on the competition between EDOT diffusion to wire bottom space and PEDOT growth on wire tips. The fabricating parameters of illumination intensity, potential, and duration are investigated about their influence on the I(V) characterization of PEDOT/SiNWs cells. The most remarkable feature of our PEDOT/SiNWs hybrid cell is its ultralow leakage current density and ultrahigh leakage resistance, suggesting a good passivation effect to remove interfacial states which constitutes the pathway for charge transport at reverse bias.
