Related papers: Characterization and optimization of high-efficien…
Fundamental electronic processes such as charge-carrier transport and recombination play a critical role in determining the efficiency of hybrid perovskite solar cells. The presence of mobile ions complicates the development of a clear…
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…
Polymer based organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology offers a relatively inexpensive option for solar energy conversion provided its efficiency increases beyond the current level (6-7%) along with significant improvements in operational…
While renewable energies are achieving parity around the globe, efforts to reach higher solar cell efficiencies becomes ever more difficult as they approach the limiting efficiency. The so-called third generation concepts attempt to break…
Because of the temporal incoherence of sunlight, solar cells efficiency should depend on the degree of coherence of the incident light. However, numerical computation methods, which are used to optimize these devices, fundamentally consider…
Current methods for evaluating solar cell efficiencies cannot be applied to extremely thin cells where phenomena from the realm of near field optics prevail. We overcome this problem by offering a rigorous electromagnetic calculation of…
Understanding the thermodynamics of radiation and the quantum-mechanical interactions between light and matter is important both for theoretical purposes and for technological advances, such as determining the limits of key processes like…
A high photon to electricity conversion efficiency of 47.2082% was achieved by a novel combination of In0.51Ga0.49P, GaAs, In0.24Ga0.76As and In0.19Ga0.81Sb subcell layers in a quadruple junction solar cell design. The electronic bandgap of…
In spite of having higher carrier mobilities and absorption coefficients of germanium (Ge) than those of silicon (Si), there has been less focus on Ge-based solar cells due to the low bandgap and high-cost of Ge wafer as well as requirement…
Among silicon-based solar cells, heterojunction cells hold the world efficiency record. However, their market acceptance is hindered by an initial 0.5\% per year degradation of their open circuit voltage which doubles the overall cell…
Numerical and semi-analytical models are presented for photon-enhanced-thermionic-emission (PETE) devices. The models take diffusion of electrons, inhomogeneous photogeneration, and bulk and surface recombination into account. The…
Nanowires have unique optical properties [1-4] and are considered as important building blocks for energy harvesting applications such as solar cells. [2, 5-8] However, due to their large surface-to-volume ratios, the recombination of…
The continuous growth in data volume has sparked interest in silicon-organic-hybrid nanophotonic devices integrated into silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs). SOH devices offer improved speed and energy efficiency compared to silicon…
We employ a detailed balance approach to model a single-junction solar cell with a realistic narrow-band, non-unity-quantum-yield upconverter. As upconverter bandwidths are increased from 0 to 0.5 eV, maximum cell efficiencies increase from…
Cu2ZnSnS(e)4 (CZTS(e)) solar cells have attracted much attention due to the elemental abundance and the non-toxicity. However, the record efficiency of 12.6% for Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 (CZTSSe) solar cells is much lower than that of Cu(In,Ga)Se2…
We propose a back-reflecting scheme in order to enhance the maximum achievable current in one micron thick crystalline silicon solar cells. We perform 3-dimensional numerical investigations of the scattering properties of metallic…
We propose a frequency selective light trapping scheme that enables the creation of more visually-transparent and yet simultaneously more efficient semitransparent solar cells. A nanoparticle scattering layer and photonic stack back…
We present a novel approach based on machine learning for designing photonic structures. In particular, we focus on strong light confinement that allows the design of an efficient free-space-to-waveguide coupler which is made of Si- slab…
Recently, a homogenization procedure has been proposed, based on the tight lower bounds of the Bergman-Milton formulation, and successfully applied to dilute ternary nanocomposites to predict optical data without using any fitting…
Solar grade silicon (SoG-Si) is a key material for the development of crystalline silicon photovoltaics (PV), which is expected to reach the tera-watt level in the next years and around 50TW in 2050. Upgraded metallurgical grade silicon…