Technology-compatible hot carrier solar cell with energy selective hot carrier absorber and carrier-selective contacts

König, Dirk; Takeda, Yasuhiko; Puthen-Veettil, Binesh

doi:10.1063/1.4757979

Cited by 25 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The dissipation of heat is then completed by the lateral propagation of the thermal energy via thermal conductivity. Since the majority of the excess energy is transferred to the electron population, the holes are considered thermalized 19,35 . Confirmation of the long-lived nature of the photogenerated electrons in the InAs QWs supports the notion that the carriers in the QW facilitate a phonon bottleneck.…”

Section: Experimental Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Even though LO phonons couple relatively efficiently into acoustic phonons in the InAs QW, the propagation of these LA modes are inhibited at the AlSb interface. While inhomogeneities at the interface 35 likely support some propagation, or leakage, of surface modes across the interface into the barrier from the QWs, the net result of these properties is that the majority of acoustic phonons are reabsorbed (and/or reflected) back into the QW.…”

Section: Experimental Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Enhanced hot electron lifetimes in quantum wells with inhibited phonon coupling

Esmaielpour¹,

Whiteside²,

Piyathilaka³

et al. 2018

Sci Rep

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Hot electrons established by the absorption of high-energy photons typically thermalize on a picosecond time scale in a semiconductor, dissipating energy via various phonon-mediated relaxation pathways. Here it is shown that a strong hot carrier distribution can be produced using a type-II quantum well structure. In such systems it is shown that the dominant hot carrier thermalization process is limited by the radiative recombination lifetime of electrons with reduced wavefunction overlap with holes. It is proposed that the subsequent reabsorption of acoustic and optical phonons is facilitated by a mismatch in phonon dispersions at the InAs-AlAsSb interface and serves to further stabilize hot electrons in this system. This lengthens the time scale for thermalization to nanoseconds and results in a hot electron distribution with a temperature of 490 K for a quantum well structure under steady-state illumination at room temperature.

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Section: Experimental Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experimental Results and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhanced hot electron lifetimes in quantum wells with inhibited phonon coupling

Esmaielpour¹,

Whiteside²,

Piyathilaka³

et al. 2018

Sci Rep

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“…To solve the issues on the ESCs, König et al have proposed a new concept of hot-carrier absorbers using MQWs [93,94]. The schematic structure is illustrated in Fig.…”

Section: Hot-carrier Absorbers With Energy-selective Carrier Transportmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the resonant energy, i.e., selection energy is suitably designed and the relationship τ eq ( τ rad ( τ th is achieved, hot-carrier energies can be converted into monochromatic emission with slight energy dissipation. The optical ESC coupled with a hot-carrier absorber Reprinted with permission from [93]. © 2012, The American Institute of Physics can be used with conventional solar cells, like up-and down-converters, as depicted in Fig.…”

Section: Optical Hc-scsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Requisites for Highly Efficient Hot-Carrier Solar Cells

Takeda

2013

Lecture Notes in Nanoscale Science and Technology

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We have constructed new models based on detailed balance of particle and energy fluxes to clarify the operating principle of hot-carrier solar cells (HC-SCs) and find the requisites for high conversion efficiency. Energy dissipation due to thermalization of photogenerated carriers can be significantly reduced, even though the thermalization time is not sufficiently long. Instead, the energy dissipation related to entropy generation associated with hot-carrier extraction is remarkable. The thermalization time must be several nanoseconds to exceed the Shockley-Queisser limit under the 1 sun solar irradiation and over 10 ns to compete against triple-junction solar cells at 1,000 sun. The other requisites unique to hot-carrier extraction are a short carrier equilibration time being around one-thousandth of the thermalization time, and an energy-selection width of energy-selective contacts (ESCs) for mono-energetic carrier extraction, which is needed to match the quasi-Fermi levels in the hot absorber and in the cold electrodes, being narrower than 0.1 eV. It seems extremely challenging to fulfill all the requisites, although investigations for material development as well as new concepts for post conventional HC-SCs are underway. IntroductionIn a conventional solar cell, a photon whose energy is higher than the bandgap of the light-absorbing material used in the cell is absorbed to generate a carrier with an energy equal to the photon energy. However, carrier energies in excess of the bandgap of the absorber immediately dissipate by emitting phonons whose temperature equals the room temperature, namely, thermalization of carriers occurs within several picoseconds in most cases. Therefore, the excess carrier energies cannot be

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“…The low electron effective mass compared to holes (m m 1.262 h 0 = ⁎ ) [18] ensures that most of the excess photon energy is carried by hot electrons [20]. This could possibly ease the design of HCSCs by allowing us to deal with one type of carriers only [21].…”

Section: β-Innmentioning

confidence: 99%