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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…
Great achievements in last five years, such as record-efficient amorphous/crystalline silicon heterojunction (SHJ) solar cells and cutting-edge perovskite/SHJ tandem solar cells, place hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) at the…
To accurately calculate efficiencies $\eta$ of experimentally produced multijunction solar cells (MJSCs) and optimize their parameters, we offer semi-analytical photoconversion formalism that incorporates radiative recombination,…
Silicon indirect bandgap fundamentally limits its ability to emit light, hindering the development of silicon-based light sources. Here, we explore a conceptually new solution to this long-standing challenge. We demonstrate ultrabroadband…
Cu-based chalcogenides are promising materials for thin-film solar cells with more than 20% measured cell efficiency. Using first-principles calculations based on density functional theory, the optoelectronic properties of a group of…
Optical refrigeration using anti-Stokes photoluminescence is now well established, especially for rare-earth-doped solids where cooling to cryogenic temperatures has recently been achieved. The cooling efficiency of optical refrigeration is…
Photonic addressing of superconducting circuits has been proposed to overcome wiring complexity and heat load challenges, but superconducting-photonic links suffer from an efficiency-noise trade-off that limits scalability. This trade-off…
Solid-state heat-to-electrical power converters are thermodynamic engines that use fundamental particles, such as electrons or photons, as working fluids. Virtually all commercially available devices are thermoelectric generators, in which…
Upconversion of sub-band-gap photons constitutes a promising way for improving the efficiency of silicon-based solar cells beyond the Shockley-Queisser limit. 1500 to 980 nm upconversion by trivalent erbium ions is well-suited for this…
Near-field thermal radiation transfer overcoming the far-field blackbody limit has attracted significant attention in recent years owing to its potential for drastically increasing the output power and conversion efficiency of…
Photosynthesis is nature's route to convert intermittent solar irradiation into storable energy, while its use for an industrial energy supply is impaired by low efficiency. Artificial photosynthesis provides a promising alternative for…
The Shockley-Queisser model is a landmark in photovoltaic device analysis by defining an ideal situation as reference for actual solar cells. However, the model and its implications are easily misunderstood. Thus, we present a guide to help…
Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) show great promise as absorber materials in high-specific-power (i.e. high-power-per-weight) solar cells, due to their high optical absorption, desirable band gaps, and self-passivated surfaces.…
The intermediate band solar cell (IBSC) and quantum ratchet solar cell (QRSC) have the potential to surpass the efficiency of standard single-junction solar cells by allowing sub-gap photon absorption through states deep inside the band…
We ask the question, what are the ideal characteristics of a near-field thermophotovoltaic cell? Our search leads us to a reformulation of near-field radiative heat transfer in terms of the joint density of electronic states of the…
Broadband, efficient and fast conversion of light to electricity is crucial for sensing and clean energy. Here we reveal the largest observed bulk photo-voltaic effect (BPVE), an intrinsic mechanism predicted to be ultrafast and exceed the…
We derive an efficiency bound for continuous quantum heat engines absorbing heat from squeezed thermal reservoirs. Our approach relies on a full-counting statistics description of nonequilibrium transport and it is not limited to the…
In single-junction photovoltaic (PV) devices, the maximum achievable power conversion efficiency (PCE) is mainly limited by thermalization and transmission losses, because polychromatic solar irradiation cannot be matched to a single…
Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) are theoretically able to concentrate both direct and diffuse solar radiation with extremely high efficiencies. Photon-multiplier luminescent solar concentrators (PM-LSCs) contain chromophores which…
We study the thermodynamic efficiency of a nano-sized photo-electric device and show that at maximum power output, the efficiency is bounded from above by a result closely related to the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency. We find that this upper…