Research Initiation Award: Effects of atomic-scale disorder on carrier transport in photovoltaic cells under concentrated sunlight

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Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing research programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at his home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The award to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, has potential broader impact in a number of areas. The goal of the project is to study carrier transport in polycrystalline silicon solar cells and in solar cells that include low-dimensional quantum dot structures under high incident optical power densities. The research is expected to be an integral part in the development of a new Engineering Science program at the university and will be linked to undergraduate students' coursework and capstone research. The carrier transport in disordered semiconductors, in particular in silicon, when the optical illumination is varied, is not understood well, compared to that in monocrystalline materials. This project proposes a new approach to theoretical modeling of solar cells made of polycrystalline silicone and quantum dot solar cells, which will combine existing theories of charge carrier dynamics near grain boundaries with a computational method that is based on both semiclassical Boltzmann and quantum mechanical wavepacket Monte Carlo methods. The project will incorporate experimental data about the material microstructure into the models and then compare the experimental and the computational characterization results. The expected application is a better design of inexpensive photovoltaic systems that use concentrated sunlight.