Semiconductor nanostructure quantum ratchet for high efficiency solar cells

Abstract

Conventional solar cell efficiencies are capped by the ~31% Shockley–Queisser limit because, even with an optimally chosen bandgap, some red photons will go unabsorbed and the excess energy of the blue photons is wasted as heat. Here we demonstrate a “quantum ratchet” device that avoids this limitation by inserting a pair of linked states that form a metastable photoelectron trap in the bandgap. It is designed both to reduce non-radiative recombination, and to break the Shockley–Queisser limit by introducing an additional “sequential two photon absorption” (STPA) excitation channel across the bandgap. We realise the quantum ratchet concept with a semiconductor nanostructure. It raises the electron lifetime in the metastable trap by ~104, and gives a STPA channel that increases the photocurrent by a factor of ~50%. This result illustrates a new paradigm for designing ultra-efficient photovoltaic devices.

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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Vaquero-Stainer, A. Yoshida, M. Hylton, N.P. Pusch, A. Curtin, O. Frogley, M. Wilson, T. Clarke, E. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8287-0282 Kennedy, K. Ekins-Daukes, N.J. Hess, O. Phillips, C.C.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2018. The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 16 January 2018 Published (online): 8 March 2018 Published: 5 December 2018
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	06 Mar 2019 16:31
Last Modified:	08 Mar 2019 02:04
Published Version:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42005-018-0007-6
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Research
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s42005-018-0007-6
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:142166

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Semiconductor nanostructure quantum ratchet for high efficiency solar cells

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