Electron–phonon interaction effect on the photovoltaic parameters of indirect (direct) bandgap AlSb (GaSb) p–n junction solar cell devices: a density functional theoretical study

Abstract

The semiconductors AlSb and GaSb have emerged, in recent years, as important candidates for photovoltaic applications due to their strong absorption coefficient and other photovoltaic properties. In this study, AlSb...

Influence of temperature on bandgap shifts, optical properties and photovoltaic parameters of GaAs/AlAs and GaAs/AlSb p–n heterojunctions: insights from ab-initio DFT + NEGF studies

“…The interface bandgap of heterostructure is smaller than their bulk band gap due to type-II bandoffsets [33]. Overall, the GGA-1/2 computed bandgaps are in reasonably good agreement with previously reported experimental and theoretical results [34][35][36][37]. The computed interface band gaps of heterostructures are in solar spectrum, particularly, the GaAs/AlAs structure has highly optimised band gap for efficient solar cell applications.…”

“…At 320 K, the photocurrent starts below their direct bandgap. The photocurrent shifts towards the low energy side as the temperature increases due to strong EPC [18,20,35,52]. In case of GaAs/AlSb (GaAs/AlAs) structures, a strong shift can be seen for 320 K (see figures 6(a) and (b)) due to the charge carriers strongly interacting with the acoustic phonon density in the energy range of 0-23 meV (0-22 meV) and optical phonons density in the energy range of 24-95 meV (23-56 meV) in the EPC process (see figure 3).…”