In this work we investigated the effects of growth time, spin-coating rates, and solution concentration on the reflection properties of the solution-grown ZnO nanorod arrays. The vertically aligned nanorod arrays were deposited on the surface of the Si solar cells as the antireflection (AR) layer. We found that the nanorod morphology, controlled through synthetic chemistry, has a great effect on the AR layer performance. We also demonstrated that the light harvest efficiency of the solar cells was greatly improved from 10.4% to 12.8% by using the vertically aligned ZnO nanorod arrays as the AR layer on poly-Si solar cells. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.