The four-junction cell is designed for use in a concentrator PV (CPV) system with more than 1,000 suns of concentrated sunlight, and gets its ultrahigh efficiency from an additional high-quality absorber layer.
The design is made up of a gallium indium phosphide (GaInP) junction, a gallium arsenide junction, and two gallium indium arsenide junctions that are "lattice-mismatched" to the substrate.
"The distinction of this multijunction device is the very high quality of the lattice-mismatched subcells," says NREL scientist Ryan France, designer of the solar cell.
