Extraordinary sunlight absorption and one nanometer thick photovoltaics using two-dimensional monolayer materials.

By Marco Bernardi, M. Palummo, Jeffrey C. Grossman. Nano letters (Print), 2013

1,839 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Graphene and monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are promising materials for next-generation ultrathin optoelectronic devices. Although visually transparent, graphene is an excellent sunlight absorber, achieving 2.3% visible light absorbance in just 3.3 Å thickness. TMD monolayers also hold potential as sunlight absorbers, and may enable ultrathin photovoltaic (PV) devices due to their semiconducting character. In this work, we show that the three TMD monolayers MoS2, MoSe2, and WS2 can absorb up to 5-10% incident sunlight in a thickness of less than 1 nm, thus achieving 1 order of magnitude higher sunlight absorption than GaAs and Si. We further study PV devices based on just two stacked monolayers: (1) a Schottky barrier solar cell between MoS2 and graphene and (2) an excitonic solar cell based on a MoS2/WS2 bilayer. We demonstrate that such 1 nm thick active layers can attain power conversion efficiencies of up to ~1%, corresponding to approximately 1-3 orders of magnitude higher power densities than the best existing ultrathin solar cells. Our work shows that two-dimensional monolayer materials hold yet untapped potential for solar energy absorption and conversion at the nanoscale.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f27d3c22d478172d2f7e0993ec673e64c6a20198

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Citations in the corpus

Graphene Schottky diodes: an experimental review of the rectifying graphene/semiconductor heterojunction (2015, methodology): “[259] used density functional theory (DFT) combined with a lineup method to calculate a SBH of 1.”
Emerging device applications for semiconducting two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides. (2014, background): “5%.(205) Experimentally, an asymmetric M-S-M Schottky junction on a few-layer MoS2 flake resulted in working photovoltaic devices with ~1 % PCE,(206)”
Two-dimensional MoS2: Properties, preparation, and applications (2015, background): “5 mW/kg, which were higher by approximately 1e3 orders of magnitude than the best existing ultrathin solar cells [50].”