Non-ideal nanostructured intermediate band solar cells with an electronic ratchet

Amaury Delamarre; Daniel Suchet; Nicolas Cavassilas; Yoshitaka Okada; Masakazu Sugiyama; Jean-François Guillemoles

doi:10.1117/12.2287716

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16 February 2018 Non-ideal nanostructured intermediate band solar cells with an electronic ratchet

Amaury Delamarre, Daniel Suchet, Nicolas Cavassilas, Yoshitaka Okada, Masakazu Sugiyama, Jean-François Guillemoles

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Proceedings Volume 10527, Physics, Simulation, and Photonic Engineering of Photovoltaic Devices VII; 105270R (2018) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2287716
Event: SPIE OPTO, 2018, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

The Intermediate Band Solar Cell is an advanced concept, which has been predicted to overcome the Shockley-Queisser limit, despite efficiencies remaining below the best single junctions so far. Practical realizations with nanostructures suffer from two intrinsic deficiencies: narrow absorption widths and low radiative efficiencies. We evaluate in this paper the theoretical efficiency expectations with respect to those two properties, and consider in addition the possibility of including an electronic ratchet. We observe that an intermediate band solar cell using a ratchet becomes highly tolerant to non-ideal nanostructures, so that any combination of low absorption and low radiative efficiency becomes compatible with optimized performances above the Shockley-Queisser limit. We conclude that future practical realization may take advantage of quantum wells, which have been less considered so far than quantum dots, due to relatively higher nonradiative recombination rates. Such realizations would take advantage of the higher absorption properties of quantum wells.

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Amaury Delamarre, Daniel Suchet, Nicolas Cavassilas, Yoshitaka Okada, Masakazu Sugiyama, and Jean-François Guillemoles "Non-ideal nanostructured intermediate band solar cells with an electronic ratchet", Proc. SPIE 10527, Physics, Simulation, and Photonic Engineering of Photovoltaic Devices VII, 105270R (16 February 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2287716

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