Understanding chemically processed solar cells based on quantum dots

Abstract

Photovoltaic energy conversion is one of the best alternatives to fossil fuel combustion. Petroleum resources are now close to depletion and their combustion is known to be responsible for the release of a considerable amount of greenhouse gases and carcinogenic airborne particles. Novel third-generation solar cells include a vast range of device designs and materials aiming to overcome the factors limiting the current technologies. Among them, quantum dot-based devices showed promising potential both as sensitizers and as colloidal nanoparticle films. A good example is the p-type PbS colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) forming a heterojunction with a n-type wide-band-gap semiconductor such as TiO2 or ZnO. The confinement in these nanostructures is also expected to result in marginal mechanisms, such as the collection of hot carriers and generation of multiple excitons, which would increase the theoretical conversion efficiency limit. Ultimately, this technology could also lead to the assembly of a tandem-type cell with CQD films absorbing in different regions of the solar spectrum.

Organic–inorganic metal halide hybrids beyond perovskites

“…Morphological low-dimensional metal halide perovskites include '2D nanoplatelets' [60][61][62], '1D nanowire or nanorods' [63][64][65][66], '0D quantum dots' [67,68], etc. These nanoscale materials might have quantum confinement in at least one direction.…”

Mesoporous Matrices as Hosts for Metal Halide Perovskite Nanocrystals

“…One of the most characteristic features of nanocrystalline semiconductors is the gradual increase of the electronic bandgap with decreasing particle size resulting from the quantum confinement of the exciton, [ 59 ] which consequently gives rise to a spectral blue‐shift of photoabsorption and photoemission. In Figure a,b, we show different examples of this behavior for different perovskite nanocrystals synthesized within porous matrices.…”

Recent advances in synthesis and application of perovskite quantum dot based composites for photonics, electronics and sensors

“…Quantum dots (QDs), which are a zerodimensional (0D) material, have attracted increasing attention as next-generation functional materials. They are widely used for optoelectronic devices including light-emitting diodes [12][13][14], lasers [15], solar cells [16][17][18], photodetectors [19] and many other applications including drug delivery, chemical analysis, sensor, bioimaging [20][21][22][23]. Due to their quantum confinement effect that appears when the semiconductor materials' size is smaller than twice its Bohr radius, QDs process excitonic features and enhanced photoluminescence (PL) properties comparing to bulk materials [24][25][26].…”