14 DAY TRIAL // Experts from the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) announce the development of a new technology that enables the transformation of virtually any type of semiconductor into solar cells.
An important aspect of this approach is that it has a low implementation cost, while yielding high conversion efficiency. Until now, only certain semiconducting materials could be used for such applications, and experts have been trying to address this limitation for a long time.
The study opens the way for using cheap, abundant semiconductors for producing renewable energy. Compounds including metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides are very promising, but using them for this application has never been possible on account of certain obstacles.
One of these limitations is that chemical reactions could not readily be used to tailor the materials' properties. The new approach allows these semiconductors to change their properties, all by simply using an electric field.
“It’s time we put bad materials to good use. Our technology allows us to sidestep the difficulty in chemically tailoring many earth abundant, non-toxic semiconductors and instead tailor these materials simply by applying an electric field,” Berkeley Lab physicist Alex Zettl says.
The expert was the leader of the new investigation, alongside colleague Feng Wang. Zettl holds an appointment as a researcher at the Berkeley Lab Materials Sciences Division, and also as the director of the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS) at the University of California in Berkeley.
He is also the corresponding author of a new paper detailing the findings, entitled “Screening-Engineered Field-Effect Solar Cells.” The work appears in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific journal Nano Letters.
“Our technology reduces the cost and complexity of fabricating solar cells and thereby provides what could be an important cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternative that would accelerate the usage of solar energy,” Zettl explains.
“Our technology requires only electrode and gate deposition, without the need for high-temperature chemical doping, ion implantation, or other expensive or damaging processes,” explains William Regan, the lead author of the new investigation.