Greenhouse Effect in Photovoltaic Cells to Enhance Efficiency of Power Beam Conversion

Recent progress in semiconductor materials with minor nonradiative recombination has stimulated investigations of novel photovoltaic (PV) converters with optical control of radiative emission. Angle restricted emission was experimentally demonstrated in PV devices with external photon recycling due to specific photonic crystals or mirrors. In this work we investigate the power beam conversion by the cell with front "greenhouse" filter, which transmits the laser light, but recycles the low energy bandgap quanta emitted by the semiconductor cell. We calculate the limiting characteristics of the greenhouse PV converters and optimize design of the converter taking into account the nonradiative recombination processes. In optimized devices addition of the greenhouse filter can increase power beam conversion efficiency by several percent.