Nonreciprocal photonic management for photovoltaic conversion: design and fundamental efficiency limits

Abstract. Significant progress in the development of nonreciprocal optical components with broken Kirchhoff symmetry paves the way for increasing the photovoltaic (PV) conversion efficiency beyond the Shockley–Queisser limit due to reuse of emitted photons. Recent papers have analyzed the PV converter with several or an infinite number of multijunction cells, in which the cells are coupled via nonreciprocal filters (optical diodes) in such a way that the light emitted by one cell is absorbed by another cell. We proposed and investigated a single cell converter with nonreciprocal external photon recycling, which provided reabsorption and reuse of the emitting light by the same cell. We considered properties of photons in the sunbeam in terms of ergodicity, disorder, energy availability, information entropy, and coherence, and established fundamental limitations imposed by endoreversible thermodynamics on conversion efficiency at maximal power output. Our results show that the nonreciprocal converter with an ideal multijunction cell can approach the Carnot efficiency, whereas operating exactly at the Carnot limit requires an infinite number of photon recycling processes. This requirement resolves the famous thermodynamic paradox of the optical diode because any small dissipation in the cell or optical system enhanced by infinite recycling will stabilize the converter operation below the Carnot limit. We generalized endoreversible thermodynamics to photonic distributions with nonzero chemical potential and derived the limiting efficiency of the nonreciprocal single-junction PV converter. The performance of this converter with available GaAs solar cells was evaluated.