Traditional photovoltaic cells are opaque, because they use dark colored semiconductors as absorbers, in order to achieve high harvest efficiency in broad range of solar spectrum. Recently, transparent solar cells are receiving rapidly increasing attention for their perspective to convert skyscrapers to giant solar farms and mobile devices to mini solar generators. More interestingly, these transparent solar cells could be used to design next generation of space probes and crafts, assisting to address some challenging problems, such as light pollution, which is now causing increasing concerns of astronomers. Here, a new type of inorganic transparent photon absorbers (TPAs) is designed, seeking to harvest photons of UV and IR light, while transmit photons of visible light, i.e., “U” type absorption spectrum. Doping chemistry was carefully applied to a landmark light absorber of TiO<sub>2</sub> to modify its band structure and optical properties. It is found that by varying its dopants and coordination environment, a suppressed absorption of visible light but increased absorption of UV light and IR light was observed. This result was further supported by band structure modelling and light absorption simulation. Quantum efficiency for photon-to-current conversion was studied to demonstrate its potential for real solar cell application. This new strategy to design light absorber is expected to shed light to the future green energy development.

Transparent photon absorber (TPA) for “seeing through” photovoltaic cells

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.