{"id":1060,"date":"2019-11-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/ordered-nanocylinder-arrays-in-solar-cells\/1060\/"},"modified":"2020-01-28T15:56:01","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T15:56:01","slug":"ordered-nanocylinder-arrays-in-solar-cells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.innovationnewsnetwork.com\/ordered-nanocylinder-arrays-in-solar-cells\/1060\/","title":{"rendered":"Ordered nanocylinder arrays in solar cells"},"content":{"rendered":"
With his ERC Grant ‘Solacylin’, Professor Julien Bachmann and his team at the University of Erlangen control interfaces in photovoltaic devices for optimised performance on the basis of simple materials and simple processing methods.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of solar cells available commercially nowadays features strictly planar interfaces between layers of highly pure semiconductors such as 99.9999% silicon or \u2018CIGS\u2019 (a copper indium gallium sulfide\/selenide) and cadmium sulfide. These materials are generated as bulk crystals or as rather thick (>100 nm) films by expensive and energy-intensive cleanroom or ultrahigh vacuum processing. In his Consolidator Grant project \u2018Solacylin\u2019 funded by the European Research Council (grant agreement 647281), Professor Julien Bachmann, chair for \u2018Chemistry of Thin Film Materials\u2019 (CTFM) at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-N\u00fcrnberg in Germany, explores creative ways to circumvent the need for such expensive materials and methods.<\/p>\n
The long-term vision is that a smart engineering of the interface between two adjacent semiconductors might enable one to exploit materials of inherently lesser quality to devise photovoltaic devices featuring a reasonable performance nevertheless. This interface engineering can take two distinct forms, which can be combined:<\/p>\n
1)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 fine-tuning the chemical identity and physical properties of the interface with ultrathin layers of near-atomic thickness<\/p>\n
2)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 adjusting the geometric area of the interface and the transport paths of charge carriers in its vicinity with ordered arrays of coaxial, nanocylindrical junctions.<\/p>\n
The method of choice in the CTFM lab for generating both ultrathin (\u22642 nm) and somewhat thicker (2-80 nm) layers, including coatings of non-planar substrates, is atomic layer deposition (ALD). ALD is a coating technique based on the exploitation of two (or more) complementary surface reactions performed sequentially and occurring in a self-limiting manner. Each such reaction step results in depositing a well-defined amount of solid (corresponding to an atomic monolayer or less) and terminates the surface with a distinct type of reactive groups. After the original chemical identity of the surface has been regenerated upon completion of the two (or more) steps, these steps are repeated in a cyclic manner until a desired thickness is reached. Moreover, because the amount of material deposited at each cycle is controlled by the surface chemistry and not by mass transport of precursors from the fluid phase, coatings or pores feature a constant thickness along the whole pore length.<\/p>\n
A significant development of ALD achieved in the framework of \u2018Solacylin\u2019 is its generalisation from gaseous precursors (which were the norm since the method was invented four decades ago) to dissolved ones. The exploitation of the liquid phase allows one to increase the range of precursors applicable to ALD coatings significantly in \u2018solution ALD\u2019 (sALD). For example, ionic compounds may be used as precursors from the solution phase, while they do not provide the vapor pressure required for regular gas ALD. In particular, scientists in the CTFM laboratory are currently exploring sALD as a method for the deposition of ionic semiconductors such as the hybrid perovskites which have proven particularly exciting in the photovoltaic community recently.<\/p>\n