Determination of minority-carrier lifetime in silicon solar cells from laser-transient photovoltaic effect

Abstract
The minority-carrier lifetime in the base of silicon solar cells has been determined from the transient decay slope of the short-circuit current after pulsed-laser carrier excitation. Two series of solar cells with the same thickness (400 μm) and with base resistivities of 0.1 and 1 Ω cm, respectively, have been analyzed. The values for the lifetime are 2.4/6.0 μs for the 1-Ω cm resistivity cells and of 5.2/19.1 μs for the other ones. The extreme values correspond to back-surface recombination velocity S = 0 or S = ∞. The results are in reasonable agreement with those obtained by other authors with the surface photovoltage method.