Reconciliation of dipole emission with detailed balance rates for the simulation of luminescence and photon recycling in perovskite solar cells.

A theoretical description of light emission, propagation and re-absorption in semiconductor multilayer stacks is derived based on the transverse Green's function of the electromagnetic field in the presence of a complex dielectric. The canonical dipole emission model is parametrized in terms of the local optical material constants and the local quasi-Fermi level splitting using the detailed balance relation between local absorption and emission rates. The framework obtained in this way is shown to reproduce the generalized Kirchhoff relations between the luminescent emission from metal halide perovskite slabs under uniform excitation and the slab absorptance of light with arbitrary angle of incidence.

Global minimum beryllium hydride sheet with novel negative Poisson's ratio: first-principles calculations.

As one of the most prominent metal-hydrides, beryllium hydride has received much attention over the past several decades, since 1978, and is considered as an important hydrogen storage material. By reducing the dimensionality from 3 to 2, the beryllium hydride monolayer is isoelectronic with graphene; thus the existence of its two-dimensional (2D) form is theoretically feasible and experimentally expected. However, little is known about its 2D form.

Microscopic Perspective on Photovoltaic Reciprocity in Ultrathin Solar Cells.

The photovoltaic reciprocity theory relates the electroluminescence spectrum of a solar cell under applied bias to the external photovoltaic quantum efficiency of the device as measured at short circuit conditions. Its derivation is based on detailed balance relations between local absorption and emission rates in optically isotropic media with nondegenerate quasiequilibrium carrier distributions. In many cases, the dependence of density and spatial variation of electronic and optical device states on the point of operation is modest and the reciprocity relation holds.

Fluorescence of colloidal PbSe/PbS QDs in NIR luminescent solar concentrators.

For applications in luminescent solar concentrators harvesting subgap photons, either via direct irradiation of solar cells with optimized band gap or via sensitization of an up-conversion process, exact knowledge and tunability of both the spectral shape and the intensity of the emission are of paramount importance. In this work, we investigate theoretically the photoluminescence spectra of colloidal core-shell PbSe/PbS QDs with type II alignments in the valence band. The method builds on a steady-state formulation of the non-equilibrium Greens function theory for a microscopic system of coupled electrons, photons and phonons interfaced with electronic structure calculations based on a k·p model for PbSe/PbS core-shell QDs.

Theory and simulation of photogeneration and transport in Si-SiOx superlattice absorbers.

Si-SiOx superlattices are among the candidates that have been proposed as high band gap absorber material in all-Si tandem solar cell devices. Owing to the large potential barriers for photoexited charge carriers, transport in these devices is restricted to quantum-confined superlattice states. As a consequence of the finite number of wells and large built-in fields, the electronic spectrum can deviate considerably from the minibands of a regular superlattice.