Recent development of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is directed toward the search for lead-free material with superior efficiency, owing to the intoxication and stability issues associated with the lead-based PSCs. Despite the efforts, plenty of exploration is still required to attain the optimum material for perovskite, along with the electron transport layer (ETL), and hole transport layer (HTL). In this study, two less explored perovskite materials Cesium Tin Germanium Halide (CsSnGeI3) and Cesium Copper Antimony Chloride nanocrystals are compared to their Pb-based counterpart of Methylammonium Lead Iodide (MAPbI3). Thorough numerical investigations and comparative evaluation of these three material-based PSCs were done using a solar cell capacitance simulator (SCAPS-1D). Based on the suitable band alignment with the absorber layers, three selected distinct ETL (TiO2, ZnO, PCBM) and HTL (Cu2O, CZTSe, CuSCN) materials demonstrated excellent compatibility. The effect of back metal contact, temperature, series, and shunt resistance on the photovoltaic parameters was also elucidated for all three perovskite materials. Increasing the work function of back contact up to 5.9 eV improves the photovoltaic parameters, indicating selenium to be an optimum material. Numerical analysis of 27 attainable structures yields the best one to be CZTSe/CsSnGeI3/PCBM with a power conversion efficiency of 32.41% (
J
S
C
= 28.73 mA cm−2,
V
O
C
= 1.29 V, and FF = 87.35%). The PCE obtained from these structures ranges from 25.14% to 32.41%, indicating that all the reported structures here have the potential to be highly efficient, lead-free, and stable solar cell structures.
In this paper, a highly sensitive miniaturized surface plasmon resonance (SPR) based photonic crystal fiber (PCF) sensor is presented for a wide range of analyte sensing. Gold is selected as the plasmonic metal for its higher chemical stability and titanium oxide works as the adhesive layer for gold attachment on silica. The plasmonic metal and the sensing medium are placed exterior to the surface of the sensor design to make it fitting for practical applications. By a careful arrangement of the periodic arrangement of the refractive index in the design, the generation of the evanescent fields is fine-tuned to obtain the phase matching between the leaky core guided mode and the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mode. Numerical simulations have been carried out by employing the finite element method (FEM) with the consideration of a perfectly matched layer (PML) to absorb surface radiations. The proposed sensor shows a maximum wavelength sensitivity of 34,000 nm/RIU (refractive index units) and a maximum amplitude sensitivity of 331 RIU−1, investigated by using the wavelength and the amplitude interrogation methods, respectively, for the analyte sensing range of 1.16 to 1.37 RI (refractive index). The sensor also exhibits a wavelength resolution of 2.94×10−6 RIU which indicates a high detection accuracy. On that, the proposed sensor would be an excellent candidate for a wide range of RI detection, applicable for various purposes such as chemical detections, medical diagnostics, bio-sensing, and other low RI analytes.
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