Temperature effects in Schottky-barrier solar cells

Abstract
It has been reported recently that the short‐circuit current Isc of silicon Schottky‐barrier solar cell increases with increasing operating temperature. The increase in Isc has been attributed to the availability of extra photons, belonging to the long‐wavelength range of the solar spectrum, due to the lowering of the forbidden energy gap of silicon with increasing temperature. The purpose of the present letter is to show that the contribution to the increase of Isc due to the mechanism mentioned above is negligible and cannot explain the experimental results. Instead, it has been found that good agreement with experimental results is obtained when the increase in Isc with increasing temperature is calculated by taking the change of the absorption coefficient of the semiconductor with temperature at all wavelengths.