With the aim of improving solar cell efficiency, a structure for realizing electron tunneling from In0.6Al0.4As quantum dots (QDs) through an Al0.4Ga0.6As barrier to AlAs has been grown using molecular beam epitaxy. The photoluminescence decay time d
ecreased from 1.1 ns to 390 ps as the barrier thickness decreased from 4 to 2 nm, which indicates that the photo-excited carriers tunneled from the QDs to the AlAs X energy level for a barrier thickness 2 nm in 0.6 ns, which is significantly longer than the tunneling time of GaAs and InAlAs quantum wells. We expect that this structure will assist in developing high-efficiency QD sensitized solar cells.
