Band Structure of Topological Insulator BiSbTe1.25Se1.75.

We present our angle resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES) and density functional theory results on quaternary topological insulator (TI) BiSbTe1.25Se1.75 (BSTS) confirming the non-trivial topology of the surface state bands (SSBs) in this compound. We find that the SSBs, which are are sensitive to the atomic composition of the terminating surface have a partial 3D character. Our detailed study of the band bending (BB) effects shows that in BSTS the Dirac point (DP) shifts by more than two times compared to that in Bi2Se3 to reach the saturation. The stronger BB in BSTS could be due to the difference in screening of the surface charges. From momentum density curves (MDCs) of the ARPES data we obtained an energy dispersion relation showing the warping strength of the Fermi surface in BSTS to be intermediate between those found in Bi2Se3 and Bi2Te3 and also to be tunable by controlling the ratio of chalcogen/pnictogen atoms. Our experiments also reveal that the nature of the BB effects are highly sensitive to the exposure of the fresh surface to various gas species. These findings have important implications in the tuning of DP in TIs for technological applications.

Combinatorial solar cell libraries for the investigation of different metal back contacts for TiO2-Cu2O hetero-junction solar cells.

Here we present a comprehensive investigation of TiO2-Cu2O hetero-junction solar cells with different back contacts (Au, ITO, Cu or Ag). Combinatorial hetero-junction libraries consisting of a linear TiO2 thickness gradient produced by spray pyrolysis and a bell shaped Cu2O profile synthesized by pulsed laser deposition were chosen to investigate the impact of the two metal oxide layer thicknesses. The back contacts were deposited as round patches onto a grid of 13 × 13 points, 169 contacts for each contact material, forming a library containing 4 × 13 × 13 = 676 back contacts. Each back contact represented a solar cell with an individual TiO2 and Cu2O thickness. I-V measurements show that all four materials provide an ohmic contact and that the open circuit voltage of ∼300 mV is rather independent of both layer thicknesses and contact material. The size of the Cu2O crystals drastically decreases with distance from the center of deposition, which leads to a drastic increase of series resistance when the crystal size is <50 nm.