Solar cells

Crystalline silicon-thin film solar cells are intensively explored all over the world due to the potential of cutting the material cost. However, light trapping becomes of particular importance when the active cell thick¬ness is reduced. An attractive way of increasing light trapping is to utilize surface plasmons excited in metallic nanoparticles deposited on the top surface of the solar cell by the interaction with the incoming light. By proper choice of nanoparticle materials, size and form the light scattering is foreseen to be sig¬nificantly increased witout increasing reflection.

nanorods have less impurity than the ones from CVD. The bulk CdS crystal possesses the wurtzite structure that belongs to the C6v4 space group and has 4 atoms per unit cell. The optical phonons consist of 1A1+2B1+1E1+2E2 at the zone center. The fundamental Raman-active phonons of wurtzite CdS have been known as: two E2 branches at 44 cm-1 and 252 cm-1; one transverse A1 at 228 cm-1 and one transverse E1 at 235 cm-1; one longitudinal A1 and one longitudinal E1 both at 305 cm-1. Raman spectral measurements were carried out in the back scattering configurations along the CdS nanorod axis.

Colloidal copper indium gallium selenide (and sulfide) (CIGS) nanocrystals approximately 10 nm in diameter or less were synthesized by high temperature arrested precipitation. The ligand chemistry turns out to be extremely important for the synthesis of these CIGS nanocrystals, and many common ligands used for arrested precipitation of metal and semiconductor nanocrystals do not work because they negatively impact the reaction chemistry and yield primarily stable molecular byproducts.

Carbon nanotube bundles were precisely grown atop a p-type silicon wafer that had been treated with catalysts to produce geometries that resemble three-dimensional nano-models to extract more power from the sun. The embedded carbon nanotubes bundles on silicon wafer promise more opportunity for each photon of sunlight to interact with resulting solar cell, as a result of increase of surface area available to produce electricity. The paper discusses morphology of grown nanotubes on silicon wafer along with future prospects of Si-CNTs fabricated solar cells.