Related papers: Direct generation of charge carriers in c-Si solar…
Solar cells based on conventional semiconductors have low efficiency in converting solar energy into electricity because the excess energy beyond the gap of an incident solar photon is converted into heat by phonons. Here we show by ab…
In conventional solar cell semiconductor materials (predominantly Si) photons with energy higher than the band gap initially generate hot electrons and holes, which subsequently cool down to the band edge by phonon emission. Due to the…
Thin film solar cells have been attractive for decades in advanced green technology platforms due to its possibilities to be integrated with buildings and on-chip applications. However, the bottleneck issues involved to consider the current…
Patterning the front side of an ultra-thin crystalline silicon (c Si) solar cell helps keeping the energy conversion efficiency high by compensating for the light absorption losses. A super-Gaussian mathematical expression was used in order…
Photovoltaic efficiency in solar cells is hindered by many unwanted effects. Radiative channels (emission of photons) sometimes mediated by non-radiative ones (emission of phonons) are principally responsible for the decrease in exciton…
We demonstrate the realization of an electrically-driven integrated source of surface plasmon polaritons. Light-emitting individual single-walled carbon nanotube field effect transistors were fabricated in a plasmonic-ready platform. The…
Future generations of photoelectrodes for solar fuel generation must employ inexpensive, earth-abundant absorber materials in order to provide a large-scale source of clean energy. These materials tend to have poor electrical transport…
A design tool was formulated for optimizing the efficiency of inorganic, thin-film, photovoltaic solar cells. The solar cell can have multiple semiconductor layers in addition to antireflection coatings, passivation layers, and buffer…
Diamond silicon (Si) is the leading material in current solar cell market. However, diamond Si is an indirect band gap semiconductor with a large energy difference (2.4 eV) between the direct gap and the indirect gap, which makes it an…
A graphene layer on top of a dielectric can dramatically influence ability of the material to radiative heat transfer. This property of graphene is used to improve the performance and reduce costs of near-field thermophotovoltaic cells.…
Silicon, a ubiquitous material in modern computing, is an emerging platform for realizing a source of indistinguishable single-photons on demand. The integration of recently discovered single-photon emitters in silicon into photonic…
Silicon's inherently indirect bandgap severely limits its radiative efficiency, posing a fundamental challenge to the development of practical silicon-based light sources. While strategies such as nanoscale confinement of electrons and…
Nano-scaled metallic or dielectric structures may provide various ways to trap light into thin-film solar cells for improving the conversion efficiency. In most schemes, the textured active layers are involved into light trapping structures…
A new transmission-type electron multiplier was fabricated from silicon-on-insulator (SOI) material by integrating an array of one dimensional (1D) silicon nanopillars onto a two dimensional (2D) silicon membrane. Primary electrons are…
Theoretically and experimentally we have proved the existence of optimal thickness of the porous layer used as an anti-reflection coating in solar cells. We have taken into account the joint mechanisms of generation and recombination of…
Thin-film solar cells that are considered as the second generation of solar cells are known for their low cost and acceptable efficiency. In this technology, semiconductor layers with a thickness of micrometer are deposited on thick enough…
Synthetic perovskites with photovoltaic properties open a new era in solar photovoltaics. Due to high optical absorption perovskite-based thin-film solar cells are usually considered as fully absorbing solar radiation on condition of ideal…
Nanostructures, especially of silicon, are of paramount importance for new generation solar cell applications. The key material requirements for solar cells are good electrical conductivity, confinement of excitons, and a tunable band-gap…
We propose an efficient plasmonic structure consisting of metal strips and thin-film silicon for solar energy absorption. We numerically demonstrate the absorption enhancement in symmetrical structure based on the mode coupling between the…
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) can be understood as two-dimensional light confined to a conductor-dielectric interface via plasmonic excitations. While low-energy SPPs behave similarly to photons, higher-frequency SPPs resemble surface…