The photovoltaics market has been growing rapidly in the past decade or so, driven by policy support, growing economies of scale, and technological improvements. Continued advances in photovoltaics manufacturing and technologies may drive further cost reductions and facilitate market growth going forward. Here, we review one such potential advance: the use of ultrafast laser processing in silicon photovoltaic production. We provide an overview of the current major capabilities of ultrafast laser processing of silicon, including texturing, hyperdoping, and combined texturing and hyperdoping. We describe each process, survey recent advances, compare to alternative methods, and report the state-of-the-art of each process in relation to photovoltaic devices. We also discuss the major challenges facing each process. We close with a prospectus for research and applications. We conclude that there are no major technical obstacles to the application of ultrafast laser texturing to photovoltaics manufacturing currently, while ultrafast laser hyperdoping requires further research and development before adoption. We also show that the use of hyperdoping for intermediate band silicon photovoltaics likely requires concurrent surface texturing or other absorption-enhancement techniques to yield photoconversion efficiency improvements.

中文翻译：

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光伏硅的超快激光加工

在政策支持，规模经济增长和技术进步的推动下，光伏市场在过去十年左右的时间内一直快速增长。光伏制造和技术的持续进步可能会推动成本进一步降低，并促进未来的市场增长。在这里，我们回顾了这样一种潜在的进步：超快激光加工在硅光伏生产中的使用。我们概述了硅的超快激光加工的当前主要功能，包括纹理化，超掺杂以及组合的纹理化和超掺杂。我们描述了每个过程，调查了最新进展，与替代方法进行了比较，并报告了与光伏设备相关的每个过程的最新技术。我们还将讨论每个过程面临的主要挑战。我们以招股说明书结尾进行研究和应用。我们得出的结论是，目前在将超快激光纹理化应用于光伏制造中并没有主要的技术障碍，而超快激光超掺杂需要在采用之前进行进一步的研究和开发。我们还表明，对于中带硅光伏电池使用超掺杂可能需要同时进行表面纹理化处理或其他吸收增强技术，以提高光转换效率。