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Multijunction solar cells are usually grown on Ge substrates. This implies several disadvantages that hinder the performance of the whole multijunction and limit their possible applications. The drawbacks caused by the substrate are:…
Solar energy is rapidly becoming a robust renewable energy source to conventional finite resources such as fossil fuels. It is harvested using interconnected photovoltaic panels, typically built with crystalline silicon cells, i.e.…
Solar energy is clean and renewable but has a low flux density. The lack of a continuous and reliable power supply reduces their average daily output. Since the infrared part is not utilized to produce electricity, conventional photovoltaic…
Ever science the invention of solar cells, thermodynamics has been used to assess their performance limits, guiding advances in materials science and photovoltaic technology to reduce the gap between the practical efficiencies and the…
The increase of cell efficiency resulting from using a diffraction grating as a back reflector is investigated. An enhancement coefficient is introduced as a figure of merit that accounts for the ability of the rear grating to increase the…
Single electron sources have been studied as a device to establish an electric current standard for 30 years and recently as an on-demand coherent source for Fermion quantum optics. In order to construct the single electron source on a…
The theoretical maximum efficiency of a solar cell is typically characterized by a detailed balance of optical absorption and emission for a semiconductor in the limit of unity radiative efficiency and an ideal step-function response for…
The incoherence of sunlight has long been suspected to have an impact on solar cell energy conversion efficiency, although the extent of this is unclear. Existing computational methods used to optimize solar cell efficiency under incoherent…
The splitting of water with sunlight using photoelectrochemical cell (PEC) to produce hydrogen is a promising avenue for sustainable energy production. The greatest virtue of PEC is that it uses sunlight as the only source to split water,…
Light trapping for solar cells can reduce production cost and improve energy conversion efficiency. Understanding some of the basic theoretical constraints on light trapping is therefore of fundamental importance. Here, we develop a general…
The open circuit voltage Voc and the corresponding charge carrier density were measured in dependence of temperature and illumination intensity by current-voltage and charge extraction measurements for P3HT:PCBM and P3HT:bisPCBM solar…
Although photoelectrochemical water splitting is likely to be an important and powerful tool to provide environmentally friendly hydrogen, most developments in this field have been conducted on a laboratory scale so far. In order for the…
A V-shaped module (VSM) photovoltaic technique, which breaks traditional concepts, has been proven by European and American scientists to enable power-conversion-efficiency to increase by 50% for thin-film solar cells. Furthermore, the VSM…
The endeavor of the scientific community to maximize the possibility to harvest Sun irradiation for energy production is mainly devoted to the improvement of the power conversion efficiency of devices and to the extension of the spectral…
The electric solar wind sail (E-sail) is a novel, efficient propellantless propulsion concept which utilises the natural solar wind for spacecraft propulsion with the help of long centrifugally stretched charged tethers. The E-sail requires…
The ability to absorb light is indispensable for high efficient solar power generation. This places conflicting requirements on the structure of a solar cell: On one hand, it needs to have thick active layers to absorb more of the available…
Electrowetting is a commonly used tool to manipulate sessile drops on hydrophobic surfaces. By applying an external voltage over a liquid and a dielectric-coated surface, one achieves a reduction of the macroscopic contact angles for…
Energetic disorder has been known for decades to limit the performance of structurally disordered semiconductors such as amorphous silicon and organic semiconductors. However, in the past years, high performance organic solar cells have…
Singlet fission, in which the optical spin-singlet exciton dissociates into two low energy triplet excitons, has been proposed as a viable approach to enhance the quantum efficiency of organic solar cells. We show that even when singlet…
Hot-carrier solar cells use the photon excess energy, that is, the energy exceeding the absorber bandgap, to do additional work. These devices have the potential to beat the upper limit for the photovoltaic power conversion efficiency set…