A Review of Ultrahigh Efficiency III-V Semiconductor Compound Solar Cells: Multijunction Tandem, Lower Dimensional, Photonic Up/Down Conversion and Plasmonic Nanometallic Structures
By Katsuaki Tanabe. 2009
171 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Solar cells are a promising renewable, carbon-free electric energy resource to address the fossil fuel shortage and global warming. Energy conversion efficiencies around 40% have been recently achieved in laboratories using III-V semiconductor compounds as photovoltaic materials. This article reviews the efforts and accomplishments made for higher efficiency III-V semiconductor compound solar cells, specifically with multijunction tandem, lower-dimensional, photonic up/down conversion, and plasmonic metallic structures. Technological strategies for further performance improvement from the most efficient (Al)InGaP/(In)GaAs/Ge triple-junction cells including the search for 1.0 eV bandgap semiconductors are discussed. Lower-dimensional systems such as quantum well and dot structures are being intensively studied to realize multiple exciton generation and multiple photon absorption to break the conventional efficiency limit. Implementation of plasmonic metallic nanostructures manipulating photonic energy flow directions to enhance sunlight absorption in thin photovoltaic semiconductor materials is also emerging.
Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/068e51c969f5f0c8a0d696b2d49a818311a71bd2
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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
In Materials Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Photovoltaic materials: Present efficiencies and future challenges (2016, background): “Multijunctionsolarcellsconstituteaverybroad field of research and are beyond the scope of this review ( 36 ).”