Semiconducting Monolayer Materials as a Tunable Platform for Excitonic Solar Cells
Abstract
The recent advent of two-dimensional monolayer materials with tunable optical properties and high carrier mobility offers renewed opportunities for efficient, ultrathin excitonic solar cells alternative to those based on conjugated polymer and small molecule donors. Using first-principles density functional theory and many-body calculations, we demonstrate that monolayers of hexagonal BN and graphene (CBN) combined with commonly used acceptors such as PCBM fullerene or semiconducting carbon nanotubes can provide excitonic solar cells with tunable absorber gap, donor–acceptor interface band alignment, and power conversion efficiency, as well as novel device architectures. For the case of CBN–PCBM devices, we predict power conversion efficiency limits in the 10–20% range depending on the CBN monolayer structure. Our results demonstrate the possibility of using monolayer materials in tunable, efficient, ultrathin solar cells in which unexplored exciton and carrier transport regimes are at play.
Additional Information
© 2012 American Chemical Society. Received for review August 21, 2012 and accepted October 12, 2012. Publication Date (Web): October 13, 2012. M.B. acknowledges funding from Intel through the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship. We thank NERSC and Teragrid for providing computational resources. The authors declare no competing financial interest.Attached Files
Submitted - 1206.5555.pdf
Supplemental Material - nn303815z_si_001.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 60447
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20150923-141105493
- Intel
- TeraGrid
- Created
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2015-09-23Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field