Related papers: A microscopic description of light induced defects…
Point defect tolerance in materials, which extends operational lifetime, is essential for societal sustainability, and the creation of a framework to design such properties is a grand challenge in the material sciences. Using three…
The thermally-induced structural evolution of silicon- and oxygen-containing hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H:Si:O) was investigated by X-ray photoelectron and absorption spectroscopy, as well as molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The…
We have studied hydrogen/lithium complexes in crystalline silicon using density-functional-theory methods and the ab initio random structure searching (AIRSS) method for predicting structures. A method based on the Maxwell construction and…
A microscopic theory for the luminescence of ordered semiconductors is modified to describe photoluminescence of strongly disordered semiconductors. The approach includes both diagonal disorder and the many-body Coulomb interaction. As a…
Nano-scaled dielectric and metallic structures are popular light tapping structures in thin-film solar cells. However, a large parasitic absorption in those structures is unavoidable. Most schemes based on such structures also involve the…
The light absorption of [001] grown single-crystalline silicon wafers can be enhanced by chemical etching with potassium hydroxide resulting in a pyramid-like surface texture. Alongside this advantageous property in the context of solar…
Organic solar cells have the potential for widespread usage due to their promise of low cost, roll-to-roll manufacturability, and mechanical flexibility. However, deployment is impeded by their relatively low power conversion efficiencies.…
Irradiation damage is a key physics issue for semiconductor devices under extreme environments. For decades, the ionization-irradiation-induced damage in transistors with silica-silicon structures under constant dose rate is modeled by a…
We review our recent efforts in building atom-scale quantum-dot cellular automata circuits on a silicon surface. Our building block consists of silicon dangling bond on a H-Si(001) surface, which has been shown to act as a quantum dot.…
Due to their high photovoltaic efficiency and low-cost synthesis, lead halide perovskites have attracted wide interest for application in new solar cell technologies. The most stable and efficient ABX$_3$ perovskite solar cells employ mixed…
We use empirical molecular dynamics technique to study the low-energy vibrations in a large 4096 atom model for pure amorphous silicon and a set of models with voids of different size based on it. Numerical vibrational eigenvalues and…
While crystalline two-dimensional materials have become an experimental reality during the past few years, an amorphous 2-D material has not been reported before. Here, using electron irradiation we create an sp2-hybridized one-atom-thick…
Metal thiophosphates (MTPs) are a large family of 2D materials that exhibit large structural and chemical diversity. They also show promise for applications in energy harvesting and photodetection. Strain and defect engineering have…
In this paper, we analyse the optical absorption in porous silicon . This is the first attempt to explicitly demonstrate that it is not possible to extract the band gap of such low dimensional nanostructures like porous silicon from a Tauc…
A 2-D photonic crystal was integrated experimentally into a thin-film crystalline-silicon solar cell of 1-{\mu}m thickness, after numerical optimization maximizing light absorption in the active material. The photonic crystal boosted the…
Solar cells are semiconductor devices that generate electricity through charge generation upon illumination. For optimal device efficiency, the photo-generated carriers must reach the electrical contact layers before they recombine. A deep…
Amorphous hydrogenated silicon (a-Si:H) is an important material for surface defect passivation of photovoltaic silicon (Si) wafers in order to reduce their recombination losses. The material is however unstable with regards to hydrogen (H)…
Tight-binding molecular dynamics simulations of photo-excitations in small Se clusters (isolated Se$_8$ ring and helical Se chain) and glassy Se networks (containing 162 atoms) were carried out in order to analyse the photo induced…
We present a model for simulating performance of 3D nano -coaxial and -hemispherical thin film solar cells. The material system considered in these simulations is hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H), with solar cells fabricated in an…
The resilience to deep traps and localized defect formation is one of the important aspects that qualify a material as suited photo-absorber in solar cell devices. Here we investigate by ab-initio calculations the fundamental physics and…