Related papers: Phononic engineering with nanostructures for hot c…
Hot carrier solar cells allow potential efficiency close to the thermodynamical limit in ideal conditions. However, the feasability of such devices has not been clearly stated so far and only ideal cells were considered in previous studies.…
In optoelectronic devices such as solar cells and photodetectors, a portion of electron-hole pairs are generated as so called hot carriers with an excess energy that is typically lost as heat. The long standing aim to harvest this excess…
Compared to traditional pn-junction photovoltaics, hot carrier solar cells offer potentially higher efficiency by extracting work from the kinetic energy of photogenerated "hot carriers" before they cool to the lattice temperature. Hot…
Hot carrier effect, a phenomenon where charge carriers generated by photon absorption remain energetic by not losing much energy, has been one of the leading strategies in increasing solar cell efficiency. Nanostructuring offers an…
Tuning thermal transport in nanostructured materials is a powerful approach to develop high-efficiency thermoelectric materials. Using a recently developed approach based on the phonon mean free path dependent Boltzmann transport equation,…
Solar cells have generated a lot of interest as a potential source of clean renewable energy for the future. However a big bottleneck in wide scale deployment of these energy sources remain the low efficiency of these conversion devices.…
One of the main approaches to inhibit carrier cooling in semiconductor systems enabling the study of hot carrier solar cell protocols is the use of concentrated illumination to obtain high power densities and create a phonon bottleneck.…
Many promising optoelectronic devices, such as broadband photodetectors, nonlinear frequency converters, and building blocks for data communication systems, exploit photoexcited charge carriers in graphene. For these systems, it is…
Miniaturization of electronic devices aims at manufacturing ever smaller products, from mesoscopic to nanoscopic sizes. This trend is challenging because the increased levels of dissipated power demands a better understanding of heat…
Engineering phonon transport in physical systems is a subject of interest in the study of materials and plays a crucial role in controlling energy and heat transfer. Of particular interest are non-reciprocal phononic systems, which in…
Nanoporous materials are a promising platform for thermoelectrics in that they offer high thermal conductivity tunability while preserving good electrical properties, a crucial requirement for high- effciency thermal energy conversion.…
Carrier thermalization in a superlattice solar cell made of polar semiconductors is studied theoretically by considering a minimal model where electron-phonon scattering is the principal channel of carrier energy loss. Importantly, the…
Introducing hierarchical disorder from multiple defects into materials through nanostructuring is one of the most promising directions to achieve extremely low thermal conductivities and thus improve thermoelectric performance. The success…
The photoelectric conversion efficiency of a solar cell is dependent on its temperature. When the solar radiation is incident on the photovoltaics (PV) panel, a large portion of it is absorbed by the underlying material which increases its…
Heat transport in bulk materials is well described using the Debye theory of 3D vibrational modes (phonons) and the acoustic match model. However, in cryogenic nanodevices, phonon wavelengths exceed device dimensions, leading to confinement…
Understanding the interplay between illumination and the electron distribution in metallic nanostructures is a crucial step towards developing applications such as plasmonic photo-catalysis for green fuels, nano-scale photo-detection and…
Phonons - quanta of crystal lattice vibrations - reveal themselves in all electrical, thermal and optical phenomena in materials. Nanostructures open exciting opportunities for tuning the phonon energy spectrum and related properties of…
Hot-carrier solar cells use the photon excess energy, that is, the energy exceeding the absorber bandgap, to do additional work. These devices have the potential to beat the upper limit for the photovoltaic power conversion efficiency set…
Silicon nanoparticles have the promise to surpass the theoretical efficiency limit of single-junction silicon photovoltaics by the creation of a "phonon bottleneck", a theorized slowing of the cooling rate of hot optical phonons that in…
Hot charge carrier extraction from metallic nanostructures is a very promising approach for applications in photo-catalysis, photovoltaics and photodetection. One limitation is that many metallic nanostructures support a single plasmon…