Thermionically escaping electrons comprise traveling quantum mechanical waves liable to trapping and backscattering due to nearest neighbor quantum wells in a multi-layer photovoltaic device. Such losses due to scattering and trapping are taken into consideration in this communication, where transmitted waves are calculated after scattering and trapping take place. In such lossy multiquantum well 'lines', computations show that only 16-25% of thermionically escaping carriers get through, and the rest are trapped in quantum wells and are reflected back to neighboring unit cells. For 6-nm width (GaAs-AlGaAs) un-doped quantum wells, illuminated at room temperature, current densities are expected to drop from 0.4 mA/cm(2) per quantum well (with recombination losses but with no scattering) down to a range between 0.064 and 0.100 mA/cm(2) per quantum well (with both recombination losses and overall scattering included in this study). (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.