Reducing carrier escape in the InAs/GaAs quantum dot intermediate band solar cell

By E. Antolín, A. Martí, C. D. Farmer, P. Linares, E. Hernández, A. Sánchez, T. Ben, S. Molina, C. Stanley, A. Luque. 2010

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intermediate band solar cells (IBSCs) fabricated to date from In(Ga)As/GaAs quantum dot arrays (QD-IBSC) exhibit a quantum efficiency (QE) that extends to below bandgap energies. However, the production of sub-bandgap photocurrent relies often on the thermal and/or tunneling escape of carriers from the QDs, which is incompatible with preservation of the output voltage. In this work, we test the effectiveness of introducing a thick GaAs spacer in addition to an InAlGaAs strain relief layer (SRL) over the QDs to reduce carrier escape. From an analysis of the QE at different temperatures, it is concluded that escape via tunneling can be completely blocked under short-circuit conditions, and that carriers confined in QDs with an InAlGaAs SRL exhibit a thermal escape activation energy over 100 meV larger than in the case of InAs QDs capped only with GaAs.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67ebd00a2d129b7f5746e4350c9e69d82aad7f37

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. A. Luque
2. A. Martí
3. C. Stanley

In Biomedical Engineering

1. A. Luque
2. A. Martí
3. C. Stanley

Citations in the corpus

• Understanding intermediate-band solar cells (2012, background): “However, placing thick spacers (around 80 nm — much larger than the traditional value of 20 nm) between QD layers removes tunnellin”