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Conventional photocells suffer a fundamental efficiency threshold imposed by the principle of detailed balance, reflecting the fact that good absorbers must necessarily also be fast emitters. This limitation can be overcome by `parking' the…
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…
Recently, significant progress in the development of III-V/Si dual-junction solar cells has been achieved. This not only boosts the efficiency of Si-based photovoltaic solar cells, but also offers the possibility of highly efficient green…
In general, perovskite solar cells (PSC) with a sensitized or thin film architecture absorb light from a single illumination. This paper reported a PSC architecture with a semitransparent Au/ITO counter electrode, which allows light to pass…
When light is confined in all three directions and in dimensions of the order of the light wavelength, full discretization of the photon spectra and distinctive phenomena occur, the Purcell effect and the inhibition of emission of atoms…
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…
It is currently possible to fabricate crystalline silicon solar cells with the absorber thickness ranging from a few hundreds of micrometers (conventional wafer-based cells) to devices as thin as $1\,\mu\mathrm{m}$. In this work, we use a…
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…
We propose and analyze a scheme for photon trapping in an optical resonator coupled with two-level atoms. We show that when the cavity is excited by two identical light fields from two ends of the cavity respectively, the output light from…
Minimizing the material usage in thin-film solar cells can reduce manufacturing costs and enable mechanically flexible implementations, but concomitantly diminishes optical absorption. Coherent optical effects can help alleviate this…
The improvement of light absorption in Si/BeSe$_{0.41}$Te$_{0.59}$ heterostructures for solar cell applications is studied theoretically. First, using simple approaches we found that light absorption could be improved in a single…
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…
The photosensitivity of silicon is inherently very low in the visible electromagnetic spectrum, and it drops rapidly beyond 800 nm in near-infrared wavelengths. Herein, we have experimentally demonstrated a technique utilizing…
Photovoltaics has two main processes: Optical absorption and power conversion. In photosynthesis, the two equivalent processes are optical absorption and chemical conversion. Whereas in the latter, the two processes are carried out by…
We propose a new concept for the design of high-efficiency photocells based on ultra-thin (submicron) semiconductor films of controlled thickness. Using a microscopic model of a thin dielectric layer interacting with incident…
In this article, we theoretically demonstrate multilevel impurity photovoltaic effect in an efficient silicon dual-homojunction solar cell that ensures an extended absorption of longer wavelength light. Along with suitable contact work…
We describe surface patterning strategies that permit high photon-collection efficiency together with high carrier-collection efficiency in an ultra-thin planar heterojunction organic photovoltaic cell. Optimized designs reach up to 50%…
Electrical transients enabled by optical excitation and electric detection provide a distinctive opportunity to study the charge transport, recombination and even the hysteresis of a solar cell in a much wider time window ranging from…
We propose an optical trapping technique in which a fundamental soliton traps an ultrashort small amplitude radiation in a symmetric hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with a noble gas, preventing its dispersion. The system is Raman-…
A film-coupled metamaterial structure is numerically investigated for enhancing the light absorption in an ultrathin photovoltaic layer of crystalline gallium arsenide (GaAs). The top subwavelength concave grating and the bottom metallic…