Emerging alternative photovoltaic technologies such as dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) and organic solar cells (OSCs) have recently gained much attention as well as maturity and are on the step of being commercialized. Bulk heterojunction hybrid solar cells containing inorganic nanoparticles and semiconducting polymers are still lagging behind in respect of device performance although they have theoretically the potential to exhibit better performances than devices containing solely organic compounds. In this article we review the recent state of the art development of bulk heterojunction hybrid solar cells. Critical factors limiting the solar cell device performance are highlighted and strategies for further device improvement are demonstrated by giving recent examples from literature.

We report on bulk-heterojunction hybrid solar cells based on blends of non-ligand-exchanged CdSe quantum dots (QDs) and the conjugated polymer poly(3-hexylthiophene) with improved power conversion efficiencies of about 2% under AM1.5G illumination after spectral mismatch correction. This is the highest reported value for a spherical CdSe QD based photovoltaic device. After synthesis, the CdSe QDs are treated by a simple and fast acid-assisted washing procedure, which has been identified as a crucial factor in enhancing the device performance. A simple model of a reduced ligand sphere is proposed explaining the power conversion efficiency improvement

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The focus of this study is an estimation of uncertainty of solid-form transition temperature (T tr) prediction based on modern virtual polymorph screening calculations. That was done through error propagation, utilizing estimated uncertainties of the relative free energy predictions at 0 K as well as of finite-temperature contribution to the polymorphic relative free energy. It was found that the uncertainty of the T tr prediction displays an inverse dependence on the difference of slopes of the intersecting relative free energy curvesthe lower the difference, the higher the uncertainty of T tr prediction. The results demonstrated that the error of T tr prediction is expected to be high (up to ∼260–270 K), especially at the temperature range close to ambient and above. The lowest uncertainty of T tr prediction at room temperature is expected to be ∼50 K in the case of virtual forms being separated by 10 kJ/mol at 0 K.

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The metal-ferroelectric-insulator-semiconductor (MFIS) structure diodes with SrBi2Ta2O9 (SBT) as ferroelectric thin film and HfO2 as insulating buffer layer were fabricated. The electrical properties of MFIS structure were investigated for different HfO2 buffer layer thickness. The experimental results show that the memory window extended significantly as the HfO2 layer thickness increased from 6 to 10 nm. It is also observed that the leakage current was reduced to about 10−10 A at applied voltage of 4 V, and the high and low capacitances remained distinguishable for over 8 h even if we extrapolate the measured data to 10 years.