A tunnel junction has been developed with an application to multijunction solar cells grown on GaSb and analyzed using a combination of electrical device measurements and modeling. The device employs an InAs quantum well embedded in a GaSb p/n junction, exploiting the high tunnel probability at the broken-gap interface between p-type GaSb and n-type InAs and having a minimal impact on the transparency of the device. The concept is extended to wider bandgap heterointerfaces using Al0.2Ga0.8Sb, achieving a differential resistance of 4.08×10−4  Ω cm2.

The impact of nonuniform spatial distribution of the luminescence coupling (LC) effect to the limiting cell conversion efficiency of multijunction solar cells (MJSCs) has been investigated. For this purpose, the laser beam induced current distribution maps of the limiting bottom cell have been acquired experimentally under varying middle-to-bottom cell LC efficiencies. The minimum and the maximum LC efficiencies demonstrated were 8.5% and 69%, respectively. To further analyze the measurement results, a quasi-two-dimensional simulation model considering the spatially nonuniform nature of the LC effect has been developed. A good agreement between the simulation and the measurement results suggests that the nonuniform LC current distribution is induced by optical phenomena such as photon escape and internal reflection. This nonuniformity then causes the absolute conversion efficiency of the limiting cell to be reduced by 1.35% at maximum LC efficiency. This reduction, when suppressed, can yield higher limiting cell conversion efficiency, which in turn may improve the overall MJSC conversion efficiency.

Hematite is an appealing material for photoelectrochemical water splitting due to nearly ideal bandgap and Earth abundance. However, its short-distance hole transport has so far hindered exploiting its full potential. Two nanostructured transparent electrodes coated with a thin hematite layer are studied using full-field electromagnetic modeling. One structure comprises an ordered array of stripes of a transparent conductive oxide (TCO) and the other is composed of a square-lattice array of TCO nanorods. We find that height and filling ratio (FR) of the nanostructured elements constitutes the most crucial design parameter where the tall nanostructures with small FR constitute the ideal design for a nanostructured electrode with resonant-size elements. The simulations show that current densities up to 10.4  mA cm−2 can be obtained in a 20-nm thick hematite layer uniformly coated onto a properly designed nanostructured transparent conductive scaffold. Practical permittivity data are used in the simulation and the results show that these structures are quite robust against irregularities that might occur during the fabrications process.

The International Energy Agency reports a 17.6% annual growth rate in sustainable energy production. However, sustainable power generation based on environmental conditions (wind and solar) requires an infrastructure that can handle intermittent power generation. An electromagnetic thermoelectric (EMTE) device to overcome the intermittency problems of current sustainable energy technologies, providing the continuous supply unachievable by photovoltaic cells with portability impossible for traditional thermoelectric (TE) generators, is proposed. The EMTE converts environmental electromagnetic waves to a voltage output without requiring additional input. A single cell of this TE-inspired broadband EMTE can generate a 19.50 nV output within a 7.2-μm2 area, with a verified linear scalability of the output voltage through cell addition. This idea leads to a challenge: the electrical polarity of each row of cells is the same but may require additional routing to combine output from each row. An innovative layout is proposed to overcome this issue through switching the electrical polarity every other row. In this scheme, the EM wave absorption spectrum is not altered, and a simple series connection can be implemented to boost the total voltage output by 1 order within a limited area.