Silicon heterojunction back contact solar cells by laser patterning.

Back contact silicon solar cells, valued for their aesthetic appeal by removing grid lines on the sunny side, find applications in buildings, vehicles and aircrafts, enabling self-power generation without compromising appearance1-3. Patterning techniques arrange contacts on the shaded side of the silicon wafer, offering benefits for light incidence as well. However, the patterning process complicates production and causes power loss. Here we employ lasers to streamline back contact solar cell fabrication and enhance power conversion efficiency. Our approach produces the first silicon solar cell to exceed 27% efficiency. Hydrogenated amorphous silicon layers are deposited on the wafer for surface passivation and collection of light-generated carriers. A dense passivating contact, diverging from conventional technology practice, is developed. Pulsed picosecond lasers at different wavelengths are used to create back contact patterns. The developed approach is a streamlined process for producing high-performance back contact silicon solar cells, with a total effective processing time of about one-third that of emerging mainstream technology. To meet terawatt demand, we develop rare indium-less cells at 26.5% efficiency and precious silver-free cells at 26.2% efficiency. The integration of solar solutions in buildings and transportation is poised to expand with these technological advancements.

Substrate engineering for wafer-scale two-dimensional material growth: strategies, mechanisms, and perspectives.

The fabrication of wafer-scale two-dimensional (2D) materials is a prerequisite and important step for their industrial applications. Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is the most promising approach to produce high-quality films in a scalable way. Recent breakthroughs in the epitaxy of wafer-scale single-crystalline graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, and transition-metal dichalcogenides highlight the pivotal roles of substrate engineering by lattice orientation, surface steps, and energy considerations. This review focuses on the existing strategies and underlying mechanisms, and discusses future directions in epitaxial substrate engineering to deliver wafer-scale 2D materials for integrated electronics and photonics.

Metal-Organic Frameworks-Based Memristors: Materials, Devices, and Applications.

Facing the explosive growth of data, a number of new micro-nano devices with simple structure, low power consumption, and size scalability have emerged in recent years, such as neuromorphic computing based on memristor. The selection of resistive switching layer materials is extremely important for fabricating of high performance memristors. As an organic-inorganic hybrid material, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have the advantages of both inorganic and organic materials, which makes the memristors using it as a resistive switching layer show the characteristics of fast erasing speed, outstanding cycling stability, conspicuous mechanical flexibility, good biocompatibility, etc. Herein, the recent advances of MOFs-based memristors in materials, devices, and applications are summarized, especially the potential applications of MOFs-based memristors in data storage and neuromorphic computing. There also are discussions and analyses of the challenges of the current research to provide valuable insights for the development of MOFs-based memristors.

Stabilizing γ-CsPbI3 Perovskite via Phenylethylammonium for Efficient Solar Cells with Open-Circuit Voltage over 1.3 V.

Cesium lead iodide (CsPbI3 ) perovskite has gained great attention due to its potential thermal stability and appropriate bandgap (≈1.73 eV) for tandem cells. However, the moisture-induced thermodynamically unstable phase and large open-circuit voltage (VOC ) deficit and also the low efficiency seriously limit its further development. Herein, long chain phenylethylammonium (PEA) is utilized into CsPbI3 perovskite to stabilize the orthorhombic black perovskite phase (γ-CsPbI3 ) under ambient condition. Furthermore, the moderate lead acetate (Pb(OAc)2 ) is controlled to combine with phenylethylammonium iodide to form the 2D perovskite, which can dramatically suppress the charge recombination in CsPbI3 . Unprecedentedly, the resulted CsPbI3 solar cells achieve a 17% power conversion efficiency with a record VOC of 1.33 V, the VOC deficit is only 0.38 V, which is close to those in organic-inorganic perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Meanwhile, the PEA modified device maintains 94% of its initial efficiency after exceeding 2000 h of storage in the low-humidity controlled environment without encapsulation.

Ultra-narrowband perfect absorption of monolayer two-dimensional materials enabled by all-dielectric subwavelength gratings.

Monolayer two-dimensional materials (2DMs) have excellent optical and electrical properties and show great application potential in photodetectors. However, the thickness at the atomic scale leads to weak light absorption, which greatly limits the responsivity of corresponding photodetectors. Here we propose an all-dielectric sub-wavelength zero-contrast grating structure that enables a monolayer of MoS2 with ultra-narrow bandwidth perfect light absorption. The absorption enhancement can be attributed to the critical coupling of guided mode resonances from two specific order diffractions in the structure, as confirmed by the planar waveguide theory and coupled mode theory. Such absorption enhancement can be generalized to any other absorptive atomically thin films, and the wavelength of perfect absorption can be tuned by scaling the dimension of the photonic structure. Our results offer a promising photonic approach to realize ultra-highly sensitive narrow-band photodetectors by using atomically thin materials.

Thickness-modulated passivation properties of PEDOT:PSS layers over crystalline silicon wafers in back junction organic/silicon solar cells.

PEDOT: PSS/silicon heterojunction solar cell has recently attracted much attention due to the fact that it can be simply and cost-effectively fabricated. It is crucial to suppress the interfacial recombination rate between silicon (Si) and organic film for improving device efficiency. In this study, we demonstrated a thickness-dependent passivation effect, i.e. the passivation quality over Si substrate was promoted dramatically with increasing the thickness of PEDOT:PSS layer. The effective minority carrier lifetime increased from 32 µs for 50 nm to 360 µs for 200 nm, which corresponds to a change in implied open circuit voltage (V oc-implied) from 545 to 635 mV. Back-junction hybrid solar cells featuring PEDOT:PSS films at rear side were designed to enable adoption of thick PEDOT:PSS layers without having to worry about parasitic absorption, showing a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 16.3%. Combined with a proper pre-condition on the Si substrate, the back-junction hybrid solar cell with 200 nm PEDOT:PSS layer received an enhanced PCE of 16.8%. In addition, the improved long-term stability for the back-junction device was also observed. The PCE remained 90% (unsealed) after being stored in ambient atmosphere for 30 days and over 80% (sealed) after 150 days.

Heterojunction Hybrid Solar Cells by Formation of Conformal Contacts between PEDOT:PSS and Periodic Silicon Nanopyramid Arrays.

Surface nanotexturing with excellent light-trapping property is expected to significantly increase the conversion efficiency of solar cells. However, limited by the serious surface recombination arising from the greatly enlarged surface area, the silicon (Si) nanotexturing-based solar cells cannot yet achieve satisfactory high efficiency, which is more prominent in organic/Si hybrid solar cells (HSCs) where a uniform polymer layer can rarely be conformably coated on nanotextured substrate. Here, the HSCs featuring advanced surface texture of periodic upright nanopyramid (UNP) arrays and hole-conductive conjugated polymers, poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS), are investigated. The tetramethylammonium hydroxide etching is used to smooth the surface morphologies of the Si-UNPs, leading to reduced surface defect states. The uniform Si-UNPs together with silane chemical-incorporated PEDOT:PSS solution enable the simultaneous realization of excellent broadband light absorption as well as enhanced electrical contact between the textured Si and the conducting polymer. The resulting PEDOT:PSS/Si HSCs textured with UNP arrays show a promising power conversion efficiency of 13.8%, significantly higher than 12.1% of the cells based on the-state-of-the-art surface texture with random pyramids. These results provide a viable route toward shape-controlled nanotexturing-based high-performance organic/Si HSCs.

Improved optical absorption in visible wavelength range for silicon solar cells via texturing with nanopyramid arrays.

Surface-texture with silicon (Si) nanopyramid arrays has been considered as a promising choice for extremely high performance solar cells due to their excellent anti-reflective effects and inherent low parasitic surface areas. However, the current techniques of fabricating Si nanopyramid arrays are always complicated and cost-ineffective. Here, a high throughput nanosphere patterning method is developed to form periodic upright nanopyramid (UNP) arrays in wafer-scale. A direct comparison with the state-of-the-art texture of random pyramids is demonstrated in optical and electronic properties. In combination with the antireflection effect of a SiNx coating layer, the periodic UNP arrays help to provide a remarkable improvement in short-wavelength response over the random pyramids, attributing to a short-current density gain of 1.35 mA/cm2. The advanced texture of periodic UNP arrays provided in this work shows a huge potential to be integrated into the mass production of high-efficiency Si solar cells.

Large-scale nanostructured low-temperature solar selective absorber.

A large-scale nanostructured low-temperature solar selective absorber is demonstrated experimentally. It consists of a silicon dioxide thin film coating on a rough refractory tantalum substrate, fabricated based simply on self-assembled, closely packed polystyrene nanospheres. Because of the strong light harvesting of the surface nanopatterns and constructive interference within the top silicon dioxide coating, our absorber has a much higher solar absorption (0.84) than its planar counterpart (0.78). Though its absorption is lower than that of commercial black paint with ultra-broad absorption, the greatly suppressed absorption/emission in the long range still enables a superior heat accumulation. The working temperature is as high as 196.3°C under 7-sun solar illumination in ambient conditions-much higher than those achieved by the two comparables.

Fabrication of highly ordered 2D metallic arrays with disc-in-hole binary nanostructures via a newly developed nanosphere lithography.

2D metallic arrays with binary nanostructures derived from a nanosphere lithography (NSL) method have been rarely reported. Here, we demonstrate a novel NSL strategy to fabricate highly ordered 2D gold arrays with disc-in-hole binary (DIHB) nanostructures in large scale by employing a sacrificing layer combined with a three-step lift-off process. The structural parameters of the resultant DIHB arrays, such as periodicity, hole diameter, disc diameter and thicknesses can be facilely controlled by tuning the nanospheres size, etching condition, deposition angle and duration, respectively. Due to the intimate interactions between two subcomponents, the DIHB arrays exhibit both an extraordinary high surface-enhanced Raman scattering enhancement factor up to 5 × 108 and a low sheet resistance down to 1.7 Ω/sq. Moreover, the DIHB array can also be used as a metal catalyzed chemical etching catalytic pattern to create vertically-aligned Si nano-tube arrays for anti-reflectance application. This strategy provides a universal route for synthesizing other diverse binary nanostructures with controlled morphology, and thus expands the applications of the NSL to prepare ordered nanostructures with multi-function.