Low-Temperature Synthesis of a TiO2/Si Heterojunction.

The classical SiO2/Si interface, which is the basis of integrated circuit technology, is prepared by thermal oxidation followed by high temperature (>800 °C) annealing. Here we show that an interface synthesized between titanium dioxide (TiO2) and hydrogen-terminated silicon (H:Si) is a highly efficient solar cell heterojunction that can be prepared under typical laboratory conditions from a simple organometallic precursor. A thin film of TiO2 is grown on the surface of H:Si through a sequence of vapor deposition of titanium tetra(tert-butoxide) (1) and heating to 100 °C. The TiO2 film serves as a hole-blocking layer in a TiO2/Si heterojunction solar cell. Further heating to 250 °C and then treating with a dilute solution of 1 yields a hole surface recombination velocity of 16 cm/s, which is comparable to the best values reported for the classical SiO2/Si interface. The outstanding performance of this heterojunction is attributed to Si-O-Ti bonding at the TiO2/Si interface, which was probed by angle-resolved X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) showed that Si-H bonds remain even after annealing at 250 °C. The ease and scalability of the synthetic route employed and the quality of the interface it provides suggest that this surface chemistry has the potential to enable fundamentally new, efficient silicon solar cell devices.

Improved efficiency of hybrid organic photovoltaics by pulsed laser sintering of silver nanowire network transparent electrode.

In this Research Article, we demonstrate pulsed laser processing of a silver nanowire network transparent conductor on top of an otherwise complete solar cell. The macroscopic pulsed laser irradiation serves to sinter nanowire-nanowire junctions on the nanoscale, leading to a much more conductive electrode. We fabricate hybrid silicon/organic heterojunction photovoltaic devices, which have ITO-free, solution processed, and laser processed transparent electrodes. Furthermore, devices which have high resistive losses show up to a 35% increase in power conversion efficiency after laser processing. We perform this study over a range of laser fluences, and a range of nanowire area coverage to investigate the sintering mechanism of nanowires inside of a device stack. The increase in device performance is modeled using a simple photovoltaic diode approach and compares favorably to the experimental data.