Highly Mismatched Alloys for Intermediate Band Solar Cells
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Highly Mismatched Alloys for Intermediate Band Solar Cells W. Walukiewicz 1, K. M. Yu 1, J Wu 2, J. W. Ager III 1, W. Shan 1, M. A. Scrapulla 1,3, and O. D. Dubon 1,3, and P. Becla 4 1 Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720 2 Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, , Cambridge, MA 02138. 3 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 4 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 ABSTRACT It has long been recognized that the introduction of a narrow band of states in a semiconductor band gap could be used to achieve improved power conversion efficiency in semiconductor-based solar cells. The intermediate band would serve as a “stepping stone” for photons of different energy to excite electrons from the valence to the conduction band. An important advantage of this design is that it requires formation of only a single p-n junction, which is a crucial simplification in comparison to multijunction solar cells. A detailed balance analysis predicts a limiting efficiency of more than 50% for an optimized, single intermediate band solar cell. This is higher than the efficiency of an optimized two junction solar cell. Using ion beam implantation and pulsed laser melting we have synthesized Zn1-yMnyOxTe1-x alloys with x
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