High efficiency carrier multiplication in PbSe nanocrystals: implications for solar energy conversion.

By R. Schaller, V. Klimov. Physical Review Letters, 2004

1,540 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We demonstrate for the first time that impact ionization (II) (the inverse of Auger recombination) occurs with very high efficiency in semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs). Interband optical excitation of PbSe NCs at low pump intensities, for which less than one exciton is initially generated per NC on average, results in the formation of two or more excitons (carrier multiplication) when pump photon energies are more than 3 times the NC band gap energy. The generation of multiexcitons from a single photon absorption event is observed to take place on an ultrafast (picosecond) time scale and occurs with up to 100% efficiency depending upon the excess energy of the absorbed photon. Efficient II in NCs can be used to considerably increase the power conversion efficiency of NC-based solar cells.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a8f7910ad342d2fee673807c12ba1b90bb9d4ac

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Citations in the corpus

Advanced Material Concepts for Luminescent Solar Concentrators (2008, neutral): “This has been observed recently and resulted in FQY values up to 300% [37], [38].”
Space-separated quantum cutting with silicon nanocrystals for photovoltaic applications (2008, background): “This process, termed multiple exciton generation (MEG) or carrier multiplication (CM), has been observed in NCs made from different semiconductor material”
Solar cells from colloidal nanocrystals: Fundamentals, materials, devices, and economics (2009, background): “With increased Coulombic interactions, the nature and rates of Auger processes [33,38] also become more important in NCs, leading in some cases to new Auger processes such as Auger-cooling [31], Auger ionization [39], and multiple exciton generation (MEG) [11,12,40].”
Theoretical Studies on the Effect of Confinement on Quantum Dots Using the Brus Equation (2012, background): “It is often called artificial atom because of its quantum properties [2] and interactions similar to bulk semiconductor materials.”