Patent ID: 8153892

Claim:
A thin photovoltaic device for solar cell applications, the device comprising: a support substrate having a surface region; a thickness of porous photovoltaic material having wormhole structures overlying the surface region of the support substrate and having a predefined cleaved surface texture to facilitate trapping of one or more incident photons using at least a refraction process to cause the one or more photons to traverse a longer optical path within an inner region of the thickness of material, the longer optical path being provided relative to a shorter optical path characteristic of a surface region without the predefined surface texture; the porous photovoltaic material comprised of a first layer and a second layer, both layers comprised of a plurality of wormhole structures, wherein density distribution of the wormhole structures in the first layer ranges from 10/cm 3 to 10 10 /cm 3 and density distribution of the wormhole structures in the second layer ranges from 10 10 /cm 3 to 10 20 /cm 3 , wherein the first layer is in between the second layer and the support substrate, wherein the second layer contains a cleaved surface; and a dimension of about one wavelength of visible light to about two microns characterizing the thickness of the photovoltaic material.