Free-Carrier Absorption in Silicon from First Principles

The absorption of light by free carriers in semiconductors such as silicon results in intraband electron or hole excitations, and competes with optical transitions across the band gap. Free-carrier absorption therefore reduces the efficiency of optoelectronic devices such as solar cells because it competes with the generation of electron-hole pairs. In this work, we use first-principles calculations based on density functional theory to investigate direct and phonon-assisted free-carrier absorption in silicon. We determine the free-carrier absorption coefficient as a function of carrier concentration and temperature and compare to experiment. We also identify the dominant phonon modes that contributing to phonon-assisted free-carrier absorption processes, and analyze the results to evaluate the impact of this loss mechanism on the efficiency of silicon solar cells.