Related papers: Low-density silicon allotropes for photovoltaic ap…
Quasicrystals have a higher degree of rotational and point-reflection symmetry than conventional crystals. As a result, quasicrystalline heterostructures fabricated from dielectric materials with micrometer-scale features exhibit…
The realization of the stable structure of Heusler compounds and the study of different properties is an important step for their potential application in spintronics and magnetoelectronic devices. In this paper, using the plane-wave…
Photochemical reactions on semiconductors are anisotropic, since they occur with different rates on surfaces of different orientation. Understanding the origin of this anisotropy is crucial to engineering more efficient photocatalysts. In…
In order to optimize the optoelectronic properties of novel solar cell architectures, such as the amorphous-crystalline interface in silicon heterojunction devices, we calculate and analyze the local microscopic structure at this interface…
The energy landscape of carbon is exceedingly complex, hosting diverse and important metastable phases, including diamond, fullerenes, nanotubes and graphene. Searching for structures, especially those with large unit cells, in this…
Silicon telluride (Si2Te3) is a silicon-based 2D chalcogenide with potential applications in optoelectronics. It has a unique crystal structure where Si atoms form Si-Si dimers to occupy the "metal" sites. In this paper, we report an ab…
Halide perovskites have been extensively studied as materials of interest for optoelectronic applications. There is a major emphasis on ways to tailor the stability, defect behavior, electronic band structure, and optical absorption in…
Metal sulfides are emerging as an important class of materials for photocatalytic applications, because of their high photo responsive nature in the wide visible light range. CdS in this class of materials, have a direct band gap of 2.4 eV,…
Organic solar cells (OSCs) are uniquely suited for semitransparent applications due to their adjustable absorption spectrum. However, most high-performance semitransparent cells reported to date are based on materials that have shown high…
We present direct imaging measurements of charge transport across a 1 cm$\times$ 1 cm$\times$ 4 mm crystal of high purity silicon ($\sim$20 k$\Omega$cm) at temperatures between 500 mK and and 5 K. We use these data to determine the…
Chalcogen-hyperdoped silicon shows potential applications in silicon-based infrared photodetectors and intermediate band solar cells. Due to the low solid solubility limits of chalcogen elements in silicon, these materials were previously…
Encapsulation layers are explored for passivating the surfaces of silicon to reduce optical absorption in the 1500-nm wavelength band. Surface-sensitive test structures consisting of microdisk resonators are fabricated for this purpose.…
Photonic crystal slabs are the state of the art in studies for the light confinement, optical wave modulating and guiding, as well as nonlinear optical response. Previous studies have shown abundant real-world implementations of photonic…
Besides being the foundational material for microelectronics, in optics, crystalline silicon has long been used for making infrared lenses and mirrors. More recently, silicon has become the key material to achieve large-scale integration of…
The discovery of novel carbon allotropes with tailored thermal and mechanical properties is critical for advanced thermal management. However, exploring the vast configurational space of carbon using \textit{ab initio} calculations remains…
We experimentally demonstrate that the addition of partial lattice disorder to a thin-film micro-crystalline silicon photonic crystal results in the controlled spectral broadening of its absorption peaks to form quasi resonances; increasing…
We present a first-principles study of the structural, electronic, and optical properties of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). To this end, atomic configurations of a-Si:H with 72 and 576 atoms respectively are generated using…
We argue that alternating-layer structures of lattice mismatched or misaligned (twisted) atomically-thin layers should be expected to be more efficient absorbers of the broad-spectrum of solar radiation than the bulk material of each…
In recent work we revisited the phase diagram of hard ellipsoids of revolution (spheroids) by means of replica exchange Monte Carlo simulations. This was done by setting random initial configurations, and allows to confirm the formation of…
We report on very high enhancement of thin layer's absorption through band-engineering of a photonic crystal structure. We realized amorphous silicon (aSi) photonic crystals, where slow light modes improve absorption efficiency. We show…