Related papers: Phononic engineering with nanostructures for hot c…
We present a concept for an ultra-thin solar fuel device with a nanostructured back contact. Using rigorous simulations we show that the nanostructuring significantly increases the absorption in the semiconductor, CuBi$_2$O$_4$ in this…
Hot-carrier solar cells are envisioned to utilize energy filtering to extract power from photogenerated electron-hole pairs before they thermalize with the lattice, and thus potentially offer higher power conversion efficiency compared to…
We use Transient Rayleigh Scattering to study the thermalization of hot photoexcited carriers in single GaAsSb/InP nanowire heterostructures. By comparing the energy loss rate in single bare GaAsSb nanowires which do not show substantial…
The radiative cooling of objects during daytime under direct sunlight has recently been shown to be significantly enhanced by utilizing nanophotonic coatings. Multilayer thin film stacks, 2D photonic crystals, etc. as coating structures…
Grain boundaries are commonly observed in carbon nanostructures, but their influence on thermal and electric properties are still not completely understood. Using a combined approach of density functional tight-binding theory and…
Optical properties of core-shell-shell Au@SiO2@Au nanostructures and their solar energy harvesting applications are theoretically investigated using Mie theory and heat transfer equations. The theoretical analysis associated with…
Achieving low thermal conductivity and good electrical properties is a crucial condition for thermal energy harvesting materials. Nanostructuring offers a very powerful tool to address both requirements: in nanostructured materials,…
Fast carrier cooling is important for high power graphene based devices. Strongly Coupled Optical Phonons (SCOPs) play a major role in the relaxation of photoexcited carriers in graphene. Heterostructures of graphene and hexagonal boron…
The design and fabrication of a metal-dielectric-metal absorber that achieves strong absorption from the ultraviolet (UV) to the near-infrared (near-IR) spectrum are presented. The proposed nanostructure consists of a periodic titanium (Ti)…
With the rapid advances in the development of nanotechnology, nowadays, the sizes of elementary unit, i.e. transistor, of micro- and nanoelectronic devices are well deep into nanoscale. For the pursuit of cheaper and faster nanoscale…
The use of photoferroic materials that combine ferroelectric and light harvesting properties in a photovoltaic device is a promising route to significantly improve the efficiency of solar cells. These materials do not require the formation…
Carbon materials are excellent candidates for photovoltaic solar cells: they are Earth-abundant, possess high optical absorption, and superior thermal and photostability. Here we report on solar cells with active layers made solely of…
Future generations of photoelectrodes for solar fuel generation must employ inexpensive, earth-abundant absorber materials in order to provide a large-scale source of clean energy. These materials tend to have poor electrical transport…
A comprehensive rational thermal material design paradigm requires the ability to reduce and enhance the thermal conductivities of nanomaterials. In contrast to the existing ability to reduce the thermal conductivity, methods that allow to…
A theoretical model using electron-phonon scattering rate equations is developed for assessing carrier thermalization under steady-state conditions in two-dimensional systems. The model is applied to investigate the hot carrier effect in…
We present a review of the phonon thermal conductivity of segmented nanowires focusing on theoretical results for Si and Si/Ge structures with the constant and periodically modulated cross-sections. We describe the use of the face-centered…
Many advanced concepts for high-efficiency photovoltaic devices exploit the peculiar optoelectronic properties of semiconductor nanostructures such as quantum wells, wires and dots. While the optics of such devices is only modestly affected…
Nano-scaled metallic or dielectric structures may provide various ways to trap light into thin-film solar cells for improving the conversion efficiency. In most schemes, the textured active layers are involved into light trapping structures…
In conventional solar cells, photogenerated carriers lose part of their energy before they can be extracted to make electricity. The aim of hot-carrier solar cells is to extract the carriers before this energy loss, thereby turning more…
A thermophotovoltaic (TPV) energy converter harnesses thermal photons emitted by a hot body and converts them to electricity. When the radiative heat exchange between the emitter and PV cell is spectrally monochromatic, the TPV system can…