Berkeley
Lab Technology Could Open Door to More Widespread Solar Energy Devices
(July 27,
2012) A
technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made
from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers
with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. This
technology opens the door to the use of plentiful, relatively inexpensive
semiconductors, such as the promising metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides,
that have been considered unsuitable for solar cells because it is so difficult
to taylor their properties by chemical means.
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“It’s time we put bad materials
to good use,” says physicist Alex Zettl, who led this research along with
colleague Feng Wang. “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.”
Zettl, who holds joint
appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley’s
Physics Department where he directs the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical
Systems (COINS), is the corresponding author of a paper describing this work in
the journal Nano Letters. The paper is titled “Screening-Engineered
Field-Effect Solar Cells.” Co-authoring it were William Regan, Steven Byrnes,
Will Gannett, Onur Ergen, Oscar Vazquez-Mena and Feng Wang.