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Amorphous silicon
About: Amorphous silicon is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 26777 publications have been published within this topic receiving 423234 citations.
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TL;DR: This work demonstrates the feasibility of hybrid PV devices that combine advantages of mature silicon fabrication technologies with the unique electronic properties of semiconductor NCs.
Abstract: Semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) are promising materials for applications in photovoltaic (PV) structures that could benefit from size-controlled tunability of absorption spectra, the ease of realization of various tandem architectures, and perhaps, increased conversion efficiency in the ultraviolet through carrier multiplication. The first practical step toward utilization of the unique properties of NCs in PV technologies could be through their integration into traditional silicon-based solar cells. Here, we demonstrate an example of such hybrid PV structures that combine colloidal NCs with amorphous silicon. In these structures, NCs and silicon are electronically coupled, and the regime of this coupling can be tuned by altering the alignment of NC states with regard to silicon band edges. For example, using wide-gap CdSe NCs we demonstrate a photoresponse which is exclusively due to the NCs. On the other hand, in devices comprising narrow-gap PbS NCs, both the NCs and silicon contribute to photocurrent, which results in PV response extending from the visible to the near-infrared. This work demonstrates the feasibility of hybrid PV devices that combine advantages of mature silicon fabrication technologies with the unique electronic properties of semiconductor NCs.
95 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of deposition temperature and film thickness on the electrochemical performance of amorphous-Si thin films deposited on a copper foil was studied, and it was shown that thinner Si films exhibit superior performance than thicker ones.
95 citations
Patent•
25 Jul 1988TL;DR: In this article, a thin polycrystalline silicon semiconductor device with a lattice constant smaller than that of a silicon single crystal and a small crystal grain size is described.
Abstract: A thin film silicon semiconductor device provided on a substrate (12) according to the present invention comprises a thin polycrystalline silicon film (14) having a lattice constant smaller than that of a silicon single crystal and a small crystal grain size This thin polycrystalline silicon film can be obtained by depositing a thin amorphous silicon film in an inert gas having a pressure of 35 Pa or lower by a sputtering deposition method and annealing the thin amorphous silicon film for a short time of 10 seconds or less to effect polycrystallization thereof A thin film silicon semiconductor device comprising such a thin polycrystalline silicon film having a small lattice constant has excellent characteristics including a carrier mobility of 100 cm²/V·s or higher
94 citations
26 Sep 2000
TL;DR: In this paper, the optical constants of thin a-Si:H (hydrogenated amorphous silicon) layers as thin as 100 nm were determined using transmittance data only.
Abstract: This work presents the application of a recently developed numerical method to determine the thickness and the optical constants of thin films using experimental transmittance data only. This method may be applied to films not displaying a fringe pattern and is shown to work for a-Si:H (hydrogenated amorphous silicon) layers as thin as 100 nm. The performance and limitations of the method are discussed on the basis of experiments performed on a series of six a-Si:H samples grown under identical conditions, but with thickness varying from 98 nm to 1.2 μm.
94 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the preparation of wafer surfaces by NaOH texturing and thinning prior to a-Si intrinsic layer deposition, and found that with a CP etch or low-temperature anneal, and with correct deposition parameters, effective wafer lifetimes in excess of 1 ms can be achieved, indicating excellent surface passivation.
94 citations