Modelling and Measurements of Normal and Lateral Stiffness for Atomic Force Microscopy

Abstract

The global demand for energy has been increasing since past decades. Various technologies have been working to find a suitable alternative for the generation of sustainable energy.Photovoltaic technologies for solar energy conversion represent one of the significant routes for the green and renewable energy production. Despite of remarkable improvement in solar cell technologies, the generation of power is still suffering with lower energy conversion efficiency, high production cost, etc. The major problem in improving the PV efficiency is spectral mismatch between the incident solar spectrum and bandgap of a semiconductor material used in solar cell. Luminescent materials such as rare-earth doped phosphor materials having the quantum efficiency higher than unity can be helpful for photovoltaic applications.Quantum cutting phosphors are the most suitable candidates for the generation of two or more low-energy photons for the absorption of every incident high-energy photons. The phosphors which are capable of converting UV photon to visible and near-IR (NIR) photon are studied primarily for photovoltaic applications. In this review, we will survey various near IR quantum cutting phosphors with respective to their synthesis method, energy transfer mechanism, nature of activator, sensitizer and dopant materials incorporation and energy conversion efficiency considering their applications in photovoltaics.