The effects of electron irradiation on the performance of GaAs solar cells with a range of architectures is studied. Solar cells with shallow and deep junction designs processed on the native wafer as well as into a thin‐film were irradiated by 1‐MeV electrons with fluence up to 1×10¹⁵ e⁻/cm². The degradation of the cell performance due to irradiation was studied experimentally and theoretically using model simulations, and a coherent set of minority carriers' lifetime damage constants was derived. The solar cell performance degradation primarily depends on the junction depth and the thickness of the active layers, whereas the material damage shows to be insensitive to the cell architecture and fabrication steps. The modeling study has pointed out that besides the reduction of carriers lifetime, the electron irradiation strongly affects the quality of hetero‐interfaces, an effect scarcely addressed in the literature. It is demonstrated that linear increase with the electron fluence of the surface recombination velocity at the front and rear hetero‐interfaces of the solar cell accurately describes the degradation of the spectral response and of the dark current characteristic upon irradiation. A shallow junction solar cell processed into a thin‐film device has the lowest sensitivity to electron radiation, showing an efficiency at the end of life equivalent to 82% of the beginning‐of‐life efficiency.

中文翻译：

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电子辐射导致不同结构的GaAs太阳能电池退化

研究了一系列结构对电子辐照对GaAs太阳能电池性能的影响。与浅和深结太阳能电池的设计本机晶片上以及成薄膜由1兆电子伏的电子与注量最多，照射1×10处理¹⁵ ë ^- /厘米²。使用模型仿真实验和理论上研究了由于辐照引起的电池性能下降，并推导出了一组连贯的少数载流子寿命损伤常数。太阳能电池性能的下降主要取决于结深度和有源层的厚度，而材料损坏表明对电池结构和制造步骤不敏感。建模研究指出，除了减少载流子寿命外，电子辐照还强烈影响异质界面的质量，这在文献中很少涉及。结果表明，随着电子注量的增加，在太阳能电池的前，后异质界面上的表面重组速度呈线性增加，从而准确地描述了光谱响应和暗电流特性在辐照后的下降。加工成薄膜器件的浅结太阳能电池对电子辐射的灵敏度最低，其寿命终止时的效率相当于寿命初期效率的82％。