5.2% efficient PbS nanocrystal Schottky solar cells

Claudia Piliego*, Loredana Protesescu, Satria Zulkarnaen Bisri, Maksym V. Kovalenko, Maria Antonietta Loi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

138 Citations (Scopus)
1037 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The impact of post-synthetic treatments of nanocrystals (NCs) on the performance of Schottky solar cells, where the active PbS nanocrystal layer is sandwiched directly between two electrodes, is investigated. By monitoring the amount of ligands on the surface of the nanocrystals through Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) measurements, we find that optimized processing conditions can lead to high current density and thus to an increase in overall efficiency. Our devices reach an efficiency of 5.2%, which is the highest reported using a PbS nanocrystal Schottky junction. These results demonstrate that even by using the simplest device architecture, accurate post-synthetic treatments result in substantial improvements in the performance. By drawing a direct correlation between ligand-to-NC ratio in the starting PbS solution and the device parameters, we provide important insights on how to gain experimental control for the fabrication of efficient PbS solar cells.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3054-3059
Number of pages6
JournalEnergy & Environmental Science
Volume6
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct-2013

Keywords

  • QUANTUM-DOT PHOTOVOLTAICS
  • ORGANIC-DEVICE
  • PHOTODETECTORS
  • SPECTROSCOPY
  • FILMS

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of '5.2% efficient PbS nanocrystal Schottky solar cells'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this