We report on the study of GaInP solar cell grown by solid-state molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) on GaAs. The effect of growth temperature on the device performance is investigated. Under the standard one-sun air-mass 1.5 global (AM1.5G) illumination, an efficiency of 16.6% has been obtained for GaInP single-junction solar cell grown at a high temperature. A worse device performance is observed with decreasing growth temperature. Temperature-dependent and time-resolved photoluminescence results demonstrate that the GaInP optical quality is greatly improved in the case of a high growth temperature. A long PL decay time of GaInP/AlInP structure indicates that AlInP is more promising as the back surface field for the future solar cell performance improvement. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.