Nanocrystalline YDC thin films with grain-sizes ranging from 38 to 93-nm were prepared using pulsed laser deposition followed by thermal annealing. Ionic conductivity decreased up to four orders of magnitude as the grain size increased. Using energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, we showed that the counter-intuitive reduction in conductivity with grain-size is likely due to dopant and impurity segregation near grain-boundaries. Spectroscopic evidence suggests that the blocking effect due to defect segregation is more dominant on ionic conductivity than the grainsizes.
In recent years, there has been growing consideration of renewable energy especially photovoltaic devices. A silicon (Si) based solar cell is the most popularly and frequently considered among the photovoltaic devices, but its bulk thickness issue lowers the performance and hinders widespread application due to the material cost. Also, this thick nature causes difference in length between minority carrier diffusion and sufficient light absorption. To mitigate the issues there have been many recent studies on Si photovoltaic devices adopting nanostructuring strategies to enhance the performance. Therefore, we report two different approaches on recent nanostructuring techniques for photovoltaic devices; bottom-up and top-down processes, which are composed of vapor-liquid-solid, solution-liquid-solid, reactive ion etching with Langmuir Blodgett and metal assisted chemical etching. Those fabrication processes enable the fabrication of nanostructures with a highly ordered and alignment structures leading to enhance the light absorption and have an appropriate thickness of Si substrate regressing Auger recombination. The fabricated nanowire and nanocone array structures outperform existing results with light absorption exceeding 90%.
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