3/27/2014 Meredith Staub
Written by Meredith Staub
Silicon is the most popular semiconductor material for consumer-grade solar cells. Because it comprises such a large portion of the solar market, even small changes in efficiency can mean drastic differences in industry prices. Using a novel infrared optical method developed by his collaborator Gavin Horn, Johnson is defining exactly how stress and defects alter the properties of a silicon wafer.
“We’re interested in understanding it at a level that is not being considered currently,” Johnson said. “And the way we’re doing it is to use a new inspection technique that lets us see the stress and the defects inside the material using an infrared optical method. We’re really excited about it because we think it could teach us a lot of basic science, but also some very applied concepts that could be used by industry to make more efficient solar cells.”
Another way Johnson and his group, including graduate students Purnima Ghale, Tung-Wei Lin, Brian McGuigan, and Logan Rowe, and undergraduate Alex Kaczkowski, are trying to improve solar cell efficiency is by engineering new semiconductor materials: gallium arsenide embedded with indium arsenide nanoparticles, called quantum dots. The band gap energy for silicon is well-suited to the solar spectrum, which is what makes it an ideal semiconductor material for a solar cell. Gallium arsenide has a larger band gap that is matched differently to the solar spectrum. Embedding it with nanoparticles of indium arsenide gives it “states” in the bandgap, which allows it to absorb the energy of sunlight more efficiently. Theoretical estimates say that cells created with this strategy could have efficiencies upward of 60%, while current commercial silicon solar cells only have efficiencies around 20%.
“This kind of cell would be more suited to things like space applications, where the efficiency alone is really important,” Johnson said.
Besides applications in industry and manufacturing where efficiency is more of a concern than cost, Johnson believes that research in quantum dot solar cells is important in the search for higher efficiencies in solar energy.
“I think the hope here is really that we’ll learn a lot about the fundamental properties of how the more complex solar cell architecture works,” Johnson said. “These materials likely will not be the future of solar energy. But we might learn enough from studying them that we can make a breakthrough and transition to some other material that we haven’t yet discovered.”