Beneficial impact of tunneling in nano-structured intermediate-band solar cell
Abstract
Using the non equilibrium Green functions formalism we propose a study of the electronic excitation and collection in nano-structured intermediate-band solar cell. We demonstrate that a thin tunnel barrier between the nano-objects and the host material is beneficial for both current and voltage. For the current, the confinement generated by such a thin barrier favors the intersubband optical coupling in the nano-objects and then improves the excitation-collection trade-off. We also show that a broadened density-of-state in the nano-objects increases the radiative recombination and then degrades the voltage. Using a detailed balance model we propose a broadening factor for this Voc degradation which decreases when a tunnel barrier enhances the life-time in the nano-objects.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1802.04212,
title = {Beneficial impact of tunneling in nano-structured intermediate-band solar cell},
author = {Nicolas Cavassilas and Daniel Suchet and Amaury Delamarre and Fabienne Michelini and Marc Bescond and Yoshitaka Okada and Masakazu Sugiyama and Jean-François Guillemoles},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.04212},
year = {2018}
}