Extremely thin absorber layer solar cells on zinc oxide nanorods by chemical spray

Nanorod solar cell with an ultrathin a-Si:H absorber layer

“…32 For the planar and the textured structure, bulk recombination is dominating, whereas for the nanorod geometry, surface recombination adversely affects the V oc due to the increased internal surface area in comparison to that in devices either on planar or textured surfaces. 2,3,9,11 This demonstrates that limitation of surface and interface states is crucial for further optimization of these nanorod cells.…”

“…[25][26][27][28][29] Furthermore, for the solution-deposition of ZnO nanorods, there is no substrate size limitation and no need for expensive and sophisticated lithographic techniques. We employ hydrogenated amorphous silicon ͑a-Si:H͒ as the absorber material rather than CdSe/CdTe, 3,7 In 2 S 3 , 9,10 CuInS 2 , 11,12 InP, and GaP, 24 since silicon is a nontoxic thin film photovoltaic material that is abundantly available. Figure 1͑a͒ represents a schematic of the nanorod solar cell design in a cross-sectional view.…”

Fabrication and characterization of nanorod solar cells with an ultrathin a-Si:H absorber layer

“…Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) and nanocrystalline silicon (ncSi:H) are among the most developed thin film photovoltaic materials, but suffer from small minority carrier diffusion length. One solution to relieve the trade-off between light absorption and carrier collection is the usage of an extremely thin absorber layer (ETA) on structured substrate, which can keep a significant amount of optical absorption but remarkably reduce charge carriers recombination [9][10][11]. An alternative approach is enhancing light trapping by employing a surface texture such as that of natively textured commercially available SnO 2 :F or as that made by hydrochloric acid etching of ZnO:Al [12,13] for superstrate p-i-n structures, or that of structured Ag back electrodes in substrate n-i-p structures [14].…”

“…Recently, the application of nanostructures such as nanorod [7][8][9][10][15][16][17] and nanowire [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] in thin film solar cells has gained considerable attention as a method to eliminate the trade-off between light absorption and carrier collection. The orthogonalization of light absorption and carrier collection paths plays an important role in nanorod/nanowire systems.…”

Advancing colloidal quantum dot photovoltaic technology

“…Alternative loading methods have included using chemical bath deposition (CBD) [166][167][168], successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) [161,169,170] and ion layer gas adsorption and reaction to form CQDs in situ [171]. A recent study has shown that although the SILAR loading method provides more intimate interfacial contact, resulting in efficient charge injection and higher photocurrents, sensitization using ex situ synthesized CQDs leads to longer electron lifetimes [172].…”