Photovoltaic generation has stepped up within the last decade from outsider status to one of the important contributors of the ongoing energy transition, with about 1.7% of world electricity provided by solar cells. Progress in materials and production processes has played an important part in this development. Yet, there are many challenges before photovoltaics could provide clean, abundant, and cheap energy. Here, we review this research direction, with a focus on the results obtained within a Japan–French cooperation program, NextPV, working on promising solar cell technologies. The cooperation was focused on efficient photovoltaic devices, such as multijunction, ultrathin, intermediate band, and hot-carrier solar cells, and on printable solar cell materials such as colloidal quantum dots.

Articles you may be interested inExperimental demonstration of hot-carrier photo-current in an InGaAs quantum well solar cell Appl. Phys. Lett.

We investigate photoluminescence and electroluminescence (PL and EL) emission images from Cu(In, Ga)Se 2 -based solar cells by means of a Hyperspectral Imager. Using the generalized Planck's law, maps of the effective quasi-Fermi level splitting eff in absolute values are obtained. A good agreement is found between the spatially averaged splitting in PL and the global open-circuit voltage. However, from a local carrier transport discussion, we conclude that the equality does not hold locally. The spatial variations are rather attributed to local depth variations of the quasi-Fermi level splitting due to material properties spatial fluctuations. By comparing PL and EL emissions, we discuss qualitatively the local effective lifetimes and collection efficiencies.

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