Organic-inorganic perovskites have shown promise as high-performance absorbers in solar cells, first as a coating on a mesoporous metal oxide scaffold and more recently as a solid layer in planar heterojunction architectures. Here, we report transient absorption and photoluminescence-quenching measurements to determine the electron-hole diffusion lengths, diffusion constants, and lifetimes in m...

Recent progresses in liquid phase crystallization enabled the fabrication of thin wafer quality crystalline silicon layers on low-cost glass substrates enabling conversion efficiencies up to 12.1%. Because of its indirect band gap, a thin silicon absorber layer demands for efficient measures for light management. However, the combination of high quality crystalline silicon and light trapping st...

The metallicity in portions of high-redshift galaxies has been successfully measured thanks to the gas observed in absorption in the spectra of quasars, in the Damped Lyman-α systems (DLAs). Surprisingly, the global mean metallicity derived from DLAs is about 1/10th solar at 0<∼z<∼4 leading to the so-called “missing-metals problem”. In this paper, we present high-resolution observations of a su...

The quartz/Al-ZnO film/nanostructured Al-ZnO/CdSe/Cu2O extremely thin absorber solar cell has been successfully realized. The Al-doped ZnO one-dimensional nanostructures on quartz templates covered by a sputtering Al-doped ZnO film was used as the n-type electrode. A 19- to 35-nm-thin layer of CdSe absorber was deposited by radio frequency magnetron sputtering, coating the ZnO nanostructures. T...

Ultrafast demagnetization of ferromagnetic metals can be achieved by a heat pulse propagating in the electron gas of a non-magnetic metal layer, which absorbs a pump laser pulse. Demagnetization by electronic heating is investigated on samples with different thicknesses of the absorber layer on nickel. This allows us to separate the contribution of thermalized hot electrons compared to non-ther...

We report on a Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) solar cell fabricated on flexible stainless steel substrate by a low cost mass production roll-to-roll process. Fabricated device has a high energy conversion efficiency of 14%, with short circuit current density (Jsc) of 36.6mAcm 2 and open circuit voltage (Voc) of 0.55V. A two-dimensional (2D) simulation model for CIGS solar cell design and optimization was ...