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Nanotechnology and Photovoltaic
Limited fossil energy resources and anthropogenic climate change underline the necessity for research and use of renewable energies.Current photovoltaic technology is not yet fulfilling this promise, largely due to the high cost of the electricity produced. Although the challenges of storage and distribution should not be underestimated, a major bottleneck lies in the photovoltaic devices themselves.
Conversion into electrical power of even a small fraction of the solar radiation incident on the Earth’s surface has the potential to satisfy the world’s energy demands without generating CO2 emissions.
Improving efficiency is part of the solution, but diminishing returns in that area mean that reducing the manufacturing cost is absolutely vital, whilst still retaining good efficiencies and device lifetimes.
Solution-processible materials, e.g. organic molecules, conjugated polymers and semiconductor nanoparticles, offer new routes to the low-cost production of solar cells. The challenge here is that absorbing light in an organic material produces a coulombically bound exciton that requires dissociation at a donor–acceptor heterojunction. A thickness of at least 100 nm is required to absorb the incident light, but excitons only diffuse a few nanometres before decaying. The problem is therefore intrinsically at the nano-scale: we need composite devices with a large area of internal donor–acceptor interface, but where each carrier has a pathway to the respective electrode. Dye-sensitized and bulk heterojunction cells have nanostructures which approach this challenge in different ways, and leading research in this area is described in many of the articles in this special issue.
Nanotechnology can play an important role in devices based on more conventional inorganic materials. In these materials, the electronic properties can be controlled, tuned and in some cases completely changed by nanoscale confinement. Also, the techniques of nanoscience are the natural ones for investigating the localized states, particularly at surfaces and interfaces, which are often the limiting factor in device performance.
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