With a simple coating, nanowires show a dramatic increase in efficiency and sensitivity

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This is a close-up view of a coated nanowire. Credit: Courtesy of Ken Crozier, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

By applying a coating to individual silicon nanowires, researchers at Harvard and Berkeley have significantly improved the materials' efficiency and sensitivity.

The findings, published in the May 20, 2011, issue of Nano Letters, suggest that the coated wires hold promise for photodetectors and energy harvesting technologies like solar cells.

Due to a large surface-to-volume ratio, nanowires typically suffer from a high surface recombination rate, meaning that photogenerated charges recombine rather than being collected at the terminals. The carrier lifetime of a basic nanowire is shortened by four to five orders of magnitude, reducing the material's efficiency in applications like solar cells to a few percent.

"Nanowires have the potential to offer high energy conversion at low cost, yet their limited efficiency has held them back," says Kenneth Crozier, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

With their latest work, Crozier and his colleagues demonstrated what could be promising solution. Making fine-precision measurements on single nanowires coated with an amorphous silicon layer, the team showed a dramatic reduction in the surface recombination.

Surface passivation has long been used to promote efficiency in silicon chips. Until now, surface passivation of nanowires has been explored far less.

The creation of the coating that passivated the surfaces of the nanowires was a happy accident. During preparation of a batch of single-crystal silicon nanowires, the scientists conjecture, the small gold particles used to grow the nanowires became depleted. As a result, they think, the amorphous silicon coating was simply deposited onto the individual wires.

Instead of abandoning the batch, Crozier and his team decided to test it. Scanning photocurrent studies indicated, astoundingly, almost a hundred-fold reduction in surface recombination. Overall, the coated wires boasted a 90-fold increase in photosensitivity compared to uncoated ones.

Co-author Yaping Dan, a postdoctoral fellow in Crozier's lab who spearheaded the experiments, suggests that the reason for the increased efficiency is that the coating physically extends the broken atom bonds at the single-crystalline silicon surface. At the same time, the coating also may form a high?electric potential barrier at the interface, which confines the photogenerated charge carriers inside the single-crystalline silicon.

"As far as we know, scientists have not done these types of precision measurements of surface passivation at the level of single nanowires," says Crozier. "Simply by putting a thin layer of amorphous silicon onto a crystalline silicon nanowire reduces the surface recombination nearly two orders of magnitude. We think the work will address some of the disadvantages of nanowires but keep their advantages."

Due to their increased carrier lifetime, the researchers expect that their wires will offer higher energy conversion efficiency when used in solar cell devices.

Provided by Harvard University (news : web)

Quantum dots with built-in charge boost solar cell efficiency by 50%

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(Left) A diagram of a quantum dot structure. (Center) A comparison of solar cells with different levels of doping. (Right) The 3D potential profile in quantum dot structures. Image credit: Sablon, et al. 2011 American Chemical Society.

For the past few years, researchers have been using quantum dots to increase the light absorption and overall efficiency of solar cells. Now, researchers have taken a step further, demonstrating that quantum dots with a built-in electric charge can increase the efficiency of InAs/GaAs quantum dot solar cells by 50% or more.

The researchers, Kimberly Sablon and John W. Little (US Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Maryland), Vladimir Mitin, Andrei Sergeev, and Nizami Vagidov (University of Buffalo in Buffalo, New York), and Kitt Reinhardt (AFOSR/NE in Arlington, Virginia) have published their study on the increased solar cell efficiency in a recent issue of Nano Letters.

In their study, the researchers studied heterostructure solar cells with InAs/GaAs quantum dots. As photovoltaic materials, the quantum dots allow for harvesting of the infrared radiation to convert it into electric energy. However, the quantum dots also enhance the recombination of photocarriers and decrease the photocurrent. For this reason, up to now the improvement of photovoltaic efficiency due to quantum dots has been limited by several percent.

Here, the researchers have proposed to charge quantum dots by using selective interdot doping. In their experiments, the researchers compared doping levels of 2, 3, and 6 additional electrons per quantum dot, which resulted in photovoltaic efficiency increases of 4.5%, 30%, and 50%, respectively, compared to an undoped solar cell. For the 6-electron doping level, that 50% increase corresponds to an overall efficiency increase from 9.3% (for undoped solar cells) to 14%.

The researchers attributed this radical improvement of the photovoltaic efficiency to two basic effects. First, the built-in-dot charge induces various transitions of the electrons and enhances harvesting of the infrared radiation. Second, the built-in-dot charge creates potential barriers around dots and these barriers suppress capture processes for electrons and do not allow them to return back into the dots. The effect of potential barriers has been previously used by the researchers to improve the sensitivity of infrared detectors.

In addition, the researchers predict that further increasing the doping level will lead to an even stronger efficiency enhancement, since there was no evidence of saturation. In the future, the researchers plan to further investigate how these effects influence each other at higher doping levels. They predict that further increasing the doping level and radiation intensity will lead to an even stronger efficiency enhancement, since there was no evidence of saturation.

?The methodology and principles developed during this research are applicable to a number of photovoltaic devices with quantum dots and nanocrystals, such as polymer plastic cells and dye-sensitized porous metal oxide Gratzel cells,? Dr. Sergeev told PhysOrg.com. ?Effective harvesting and conversion of infrared radiation due to optimized electron-hole kinetics in structures with quantum dots and nanocrystals will lead to potential breakthroughs in the area of solar energy conversion.?