What is it about?

In a typical solar cell, a large portion of the suns energy is unavoidably lost as heat and can't be converted to electricity. We review the potential of using semiconducting, elongated nanostructures, known as nanowires, to realize devices that extract so called hot-carriers and covert their energy to electricity instead of heat.

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Why is it important?

Control over hot-carriers can not only boost the efficiency of solar cells to new limits but are also of interest for several applications such as IR-photodetectors, transistor technology, photochemical reactions, novel cancer treatments and more. Here we highlight the properties that make nanowires beneficial for hot-carrier optoelectronic devices, suggest how devices can be realized, and provide guidance to direct future efforts on the topic.

Perspectives

My goal for this review was to gather all the information I wish I had known once I started my PhD project on the topic. Hence the idea is that someone curious about nanowire-based, hot-carrier optoelectronic devices, but without much prior experience, will get an overview of what is known and what is not known on the topic.

jonatan fast
Lunds Universitet

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Hot-carrier optoelectronic devices based on semiconductor nanowires, Applied Physics Reviews, June 2021, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0038263.
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