KEYWORDS: Nanostructuring, Electrodes, Solar cells, Transparent conductors, Nanostructures, Absorption, Silicon, Thin film solar cells, Zinc oxide, Tandem solar cells
We report the use of nanostructured substrates as a simple approach to improve the performance of tandem micromorph silicon solar cells. In the proposed approach, nanostructured substrates are produced using a low-cost, self-assembled growth process. The use of a nanostructured substrate coated with a thick transparent conductive oxide electrode layer enables the conformal deposition of the tandem solar cell absorber layers while allowing the solar cell to exhibit a modified surface morphology caused by the underlying nanostructured morphology. Using this nanostructured substrate approach, we demonstrated a 78% relative enhancement in the conversion efficiency of a tandem micromorph silicon cell on a nanostructured substrate compared to a standard tandem micromorph cell deposited onto a flat substrate.
Single GaSb Nanowire Field Effect Transistors (NWFETs) were fabricated and their electrical transport
measurements were conducted at the temperatures ranging from 298 K to 503 K. The current on/off ratios as large as 3
orders of magnitude were observed. The Raman spectra and EDAX were performed on single wires to verify the GaSb
property before and after the transport study. The temperature dependent current-voltage characteristic shows
asymmetric current through the device due to asymmetric back-to-back Schottky contacts at the two ends of the wire.
Arrhenius plots revealed effective Schottky barrier heights around ØBeff =0.53eV. Measurement conducted on back-gated nanowire transistors shows the polarity of nanowire to be n-type.
GaN nanowires have been the subject of intense research lately, due to the many potential ultraviolet applications and
interesting properties that they possess. Because GaN has an anisotropic wurtzite crystal structure, many of its properties
are dependent upon crystal orientation. For example, the photoluminescence (PL) of GaN nanowires with growth
direction along the a-axis is blue-shifted relative to the PL of wires with growth direction along the c-axis. However, the
origin of the difference in PL between nanowire samples of different growth directions remains unclear. To determine if
surface states play a role in the dependence of GaN nanowire photoluminescence on crystal orientation, we use time-integrated
photoluminescence (TIPL) and time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) to study the PL from GaN nanowire
samples of different crystallographic orientations. We observe temporal dynamics of the blue-shifted PL feature in the a-axis
GaN nanowires that is suggestive of a surface trapping process occurring, where some fraction of electron-hole
pairs are prevented from recombining via the band edge emission process because carriers diffuse to the surface where
they are trapped before carrier relaxation to the band edge is complete. Once a carrier is trapped and localized at a
surface trap state, light emission primarily occurs only when the complementary carrier diffuses to the same surface trap.
We envision that a thin oxide layer forming at the surface introduces surface traps that cause the blue emission, and that
the surfaces of the a-axis GaN nanowires are more susceptible to this oxidation than the c-axis GaN nanowire surfaces.
Here, we report a direct synthesis approach for obtaining GaN nanowires with control on growth directions: <0001> or
c-direction, and <10-10> or a-direction, on amorphous substrates. The direct nitridation of Ga droplets using either
dissociated ammonia or N2/H2 plasma resulted in GaN nanowires with <0001> growth direction; and the vapor transport
of controlled (low) amounts of Ga flux in the presence of dissociated ammonia resulted in GaN nanowires with <10-10>
growth direction. In both cases, the resulting GaN nanowires have diameters as small as 20 nm and lengths exceeding
one hundred microns. Photoluminescence measurements showed that the bandgap of <10-10> wires blue-shifted by 50
meV from the wires with <0001> direction. Homo-epitaxial growth studies onto the pre-synthesized a-direction GaN
nanowires led to belt or ribbon shaped morphologies. Homo-epitaxial growth onto c-direction wires developed micro
hexagonal prism morphologies. The island growth morphologies observed on the hundred micron long, sub 30 nm size
nanowires suggest that the surface transport of adatoms on c-direction wires exhibit ballistic transport or "one-dimensional"
transport with mean distances over several tens of microns.
We have performed time-resolved terahertz (THz) - near-IR (NIR) two-color spectroscopy on InSb, using the Stanford picosecond free-electron laser synchronized with a femtosecond NIR Ti:Sapphire laser. The initial NIR pulse excites non-equilibrium electron and holes, which absorb the picosecond THz pulse. The time profile of the photo-induced absorption is a sensitive probe of intraband carrier relaxation dynamics. Using these techniques we have made the first observation of time-resolved cyclotron resonance (TRCR) of photo-created electronics in InSb for time delays from a few picoseconds to several tens of nanoseconds. This TRCR data shows possible evidence of a magnetic-field- induced LO-photon bottleneck effect. Furthermore, we have detected very unusual multi-component relaxation and photo- induced transparency under certain conditions.
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