Related papers: Hot carrier solar cells by adiabatic cooling
We study the charge and spin transport under high electric field (up to several kV/cm) on the surface of topological insulator Bi$_2$Se$_3$, where the electron-surface optical phonon scattering dominates except at very low temperature. Due…
Organic heterojunction solar cells are analyzed within a minimal model that includes the essential physical features of such systems. The dynamical properties of this model, calculated using a master equation approach, account for the…
Concentrating solar power, particularly parabolic trough system with solar concentrations less than 50, requires spectrally selective solar absorbers that are thermally stable at high temperatures of 400degC above to achieve high…
The paper considers a model for the solar cell as a mechanical open-cycle thermodynamic engine where the chemical potential is produced in an isochoric process corresponding to the thermalization of electron-hole pairs. Expansion of the…
Methods of exceeding the detailed balance limit for a single junction solar cell have included down-converting high energy photons to produce two photons; and carrier multiplication, whereby high energy photons produce more than one…
While direct hot-carrier transfer can increase photo-catalytic activity, it is difficult to discern experimentally and competes with several other mechanisms. To shed light on these aspects, here, we model from first principles hot-carrier…
Carrier Selective (CS) Silicon solar cells are increasingly explored as a low cost alternative to PN junction Silicon solar cells. While the recent trends on power conversion efficiency are encouraging, the temperature coefficient and hence…
Hot carrier solar cells aim to overcome the theoretical limit of single-junction photovoltaic devices by suppressing the thermalization of hot carriers and extracting them through energy selective contacts. Designing efficient hot carrier…
The interplay between the illuminated excitation of carriers and subsequent thermalization and recombination leads to the formation of non-equilibrium distributions for the "hot" carriers and to heating of both electrons, holes and phonons.…
It is known that when strong electric field is applied to a semiconductor sample, the current voltage characteristic deviates from the linear response. In this letter, we propose a new point of view of nonlinearity in semiconductors which…
Electric power may, in principle, be generated in a highly efficient manner from heat created by focused solar irradiation, chemical combustion, or nuclear decay by means of thermionic energy conversion. As the conversion efficiency of the…
We report a low cost and scalable method to synthesize solar selective nanofluids from 'used engine oil'. The as-prepared nanofluids exhibit excellent long-term stability and photo-thermal conversion efficiency. Moreover, these were found…
We analyze standard theoretical models of solar energy conversion developed to study solar cells and photosynthetic systems. We show that the assumption that the energy transfer to the reaction center/electric circuit is through a decay…
The challenge in solar energy today is not the cost of photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation, already competing with fossil fuel prices, but rather utility-scale energy storage and flexibility in supply. Low-cost thermal energy storage…
In autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs), battery energy must be judiciously allocated to satisfy primary propulsion demands and secondary auxiliary demands, particularly the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. This…
A p-n junction maintained at above ambient temperature can work as a heat engine, converting some of the supplied heat into electricity and rejecting entropy by interband emission. Such thermoradiative cells have potential to harvest…
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…
A typical signature of charge extraction in disordered organic systems is dispersive transport, which implies a distribution of charge carrier mobilities that negatively impact on device performance. Dispersive transport has been commonly…
Understanding and controlling properties of plasmon-induced hot carriers is a key step towards next-generation photovoltaic and photocatalytic devices. Here, we uncover a route to engineering hot-carrier generation rates of silver…
A theoretical investigation of the excess energy dissipation of highly excited photoinjected carriers in zinc selenide (ZnSe) is presented. The calculations are performed by solving numerically coupled quantum transport equations for the…