No Arabic abstract
The incompatibility between defect-tolerance and structural stability is a severe issue hindering the wide application of high-efficiency solar cells. Usually, covalent/polar semiconductors with prototype of Si/CdTe crystals exhibit great structural stability owing to their compactly composed tetrahedral building blocks, but present extremely poor defect-tolerance due to the similar electronegativity of component elements. On the contrary, ionic semiconductors, such as perovskite series, always exhibit benign electronic properties of intrinsic defects owing to the great disparity of electronegativity between anions and cations, but are structurally unstable because of the sparsely composed octahedral building blocks supported by large cations. Combining the stable framework of covalent semiconductors and benign defects of ionic compounds, we find that HgX2S4 (X=In, Sc and Y) spinel semiconductors possess both the merits. The tightly combined tetrahedral and octahedral blocks ensures the structural stability, and the band edge of ionic characteristic, which is mainly dominated by Hg-6s and S-3p orbitals for conduction band minimum (CBM) and valence band maximum (VBM), respectively, makes HgX2S4 defect-tolerant. The prominent downward bending of CBM caused by spatially spreading Hg-6s spherical orbital not only induces a suitable optical band gap which is often too large in ionic compounds, but also promotes the formation and transport of n-type carriers. This study presents that Hg-based chalcogenide spinels are promising candidates for high-efficiency solar cells, and suggests that adopting cations with delocalized orbitals under the framework of spinel crystal is an alternative way for synthesizing the stable and defect-tolerant photovoltaic materials.
We report a correlation between structural phase stability and magnetic properties of Co2FeO4 spinel oxide. We employed mechanical alloying and subsequent annealing to obtain the desired samples. The particle size of the samples changes from 25 nm to 45 nm. The structural phase separation of samples, except sample annealed at 9000C, into Co rich and Fe rich spinel phase has been examined from XRD spectrum, SEM picture, along with EDAX spectrum, and magnetic measurements. The present study indicated the ferrimagnetic character of Co2FeO4, irrespective of structural phase stability. The observation of mixed ferrimagnetic phases, associated with two Curie temperatures at TC1 and TC2 (>TC1), respectively, provides the additional support of the splitting of single cubic spinel phase in Co2FeO4 spinel oxide.
We report both transport measurements and spectroscopic data of polymer/fullerene blend photovoltaics using a small library of fullerene esters to correlate device properties with a range of functionality and structural diversity of the ester substituent. We observe that minor structural changes can lead to significant differences in device efficiency and lifetime. Surprisingly, we have found that isomeric R-groups in the fullerene ester-based devices we have studied have very different efficiencies. The characteristic lifetimes derived from both transport and spectroscopic measurements are generally comparable, however some more rapid effects in specific fullerene esters are not observed spectroscopically. Our results support using a library approach for optimizing device performance in these systems.
Point defects in metal halide perovskites play a critical role in determining their properties and optoelectronic performance; however, many open questions remain unanswered. In this work, we apply impedance spectroscopy and deep-level transient spectroscopy to characterize the ionic defect landscape in methylammonium lead triiodide ($MAPbI_3$) perovskites in which defects were purposely introduced by fractionally changing the precursor stoichiometry. Our results highlight the profound influence of defects on the electronic landscape, exemplified by their impact on the device built-in potential, and consequently, the open-circuit voltage. Even low ion densities can have an impact on the electronic landscape when both cations and anions are considered as mobile. Moreover, we find that all measured ionic defects fulfil the Meyer--Neldel rule with a characteristic energy connected to the underlying ion hopping process. These findings support a general categorization of defects in halide perovskite compounds.
Deposition of perovskite thin films by antisolvent engineering is one of the most common methods employed in perovskite photovoltaics research. Herein, we report on a general method that allows the fabrication of highly efficient perovskite solar cells by any antisolvent via the manipulation of the antisolvent application rate. Through a detailed structural, compositional and microstructural characterization of perovskite layers fabricated by 14 different antisolvents, we identify two key factors that influence the quality of the perovskite active layer: the solubility of the organic precursors in the antisolvent and its miscibility with the host solvent(s) of the perovskite precursor solution. Depending on these two factors, each antisolvent can be utilized to produce high performance devices reaching power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) that exceed 21%. Moreover, we demonstrate that by employing the optimal antisolvent application procedure, highly efficient solar cells can be fabricated from a broad range of precursor stoichiometries, with either a significant excess or deficiency of organic iodides.
The GaAs/AlGaAs materials system is well suited to multi-bandgap applications such as the multiple quantum well solar cell. GaAs quantum wells are inserted in the undoped AlGaAs active region of a pin structure to extend the absorption range while retaining a higher open circuit voltage than would be provided by a cell made of the well material alone. Unfortunately aluminium gallium arsenide (AlGaAs) suffers from poor transport characteristics due to DX centres and oxygen contamination during growth, which degrade the spectral response. We investigate three mechanisms for improving the spectral response of the MQW solar cell while an experimental study of the open circuit voltage examines the voltage enhancement. An optimised structure for a high efficiency GaAs/AlGaAs solar cell is proposed.