Related papers: Angular constraint on light-trapping absorption en…
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…
Stability is one of the most important challenges facing organic solar cells (OSC) on their path to commercialization. In the high-performance material system PM6:Y6 studied here, investigate degradation mechanisms of inverted photovoltaic…
We propose a solar thermal energy conversion system consisting of a solar absorber, a thermoradiative cell or negative illumination photodiode, and a photovoltaic cell. Because it is a heat engine, this system can also be paired with…
The rigorous coupled wave approach (RCWA) was implemented to investigate optical absorption in a triple-p-i-n-junction amorphous-silicon solar cell with a 2D metallic periodically corrugated backreflector (PCBR). Both total and useful…
In this review, we present and discussed the main trends in photovoltaics with emphasize on the conversion efficiency limits. The theoretical limits of various photovoltaics device concepts are presented and analyzed using a flexible…
Photovoltaic materials are recognized for their potential as sustainable energy sources that enable the conversion between light and electrical energy. However, solar cells have been unable to surpass the theoretical limit of 32%, known as…
A general framework for determining fundamental bounds in nanophotonics is introduced in this paper. The theory is based on convex optimization of dual problems constructed from operators generated by electromagnetic integral equations. The…
Organic-inorganic halide perovskite solar cells have enormous potential to impact the existing photovoltaic industry. As realizing a higher conversion efficiency of the solar cell is still the most crucial task, a great number of schemes…
We suggest a novel concept of efficient light-trapping structures for thin-film solar cells based on arrays of planar nanoantennas operating far from plasmonic resonances. The operation principle of our structures relies on the excitation…
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…
Light management is of great importance to photovoltaic cells, as it determines the fraction of incident light entering the device. An optimal pn-junction combined with an optimal light absorption can lead to a solar cell efficiency above…
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 efficiency of solution-processed colloidal quantum dot (QD) based solar cells is limited by poor charge transport in the active layer of the device, which originates from multiple trapping sites provided by QD surface defects. We apply…
Coherence-enhanced light harvesting has not been directly observed experimentally, despite theoretical evidence that coherence can significantly enhance light-harvesting performance. The main experimental obstacle has been the difficulty in…
The thermodynamic limit of photovoltaic efficiency for a single-junction solar cell can be readily predicted using the bandgap of the active light absorbing material. Such an approach overlooks the energy loss due to non-radiative…
The current frontier of solar neutrino physics is the observation of CNO neutrinos. The signals of CNO and PP neutrinos are however entangled: In fact, the pp-flux can be known precisely only if CNO-flux is quantified; the interpretation of…
The surface of thin-film solar cells can be tailored with photonic nanostructures to allow light trapping in the absorbing medium. This in turn increases the optical thickness of the film and thus enhances their absorption. Such a coherent…
It is of significance to incorporate spectral selectivity technology into solar thermal engineering, especially at high operational temperatures. This work demonstrates spectrally selective solar absorbers made of multilayer tungsten,…
Confining electromagnetic energy is crucial to enhance light-matter interactions, with important implications for science and technology. Here, we discuss the opportunities offered by trapping and confining light in open structures, based…
Motivated by the cabling of solar farms, we study the problem Constrained Layer Tree. At its core, it asks whether there exists a tree that connects a set of sources (the leaves) to one sink (the root) such that certain capacity constraints…