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Silicon Nanostructures for Optical Communications
Published in Anwar Sohail, Raja M Yasin Anwar Akhtar, Raja Qazi Salahuddin, Ilyas Mohammad, Nanotechnology for Telecommunications, 2017
Adam A. Filios, Yeong S. Ryu, Kamal Shahrabi, Raphael Tsu
The use of nanocrystalline silicon holds the promise to realize both high performance and low cost in photovoltaic solar cells. Nanoscale silicon provides much better chemical stability than thin film polycrystalline or amorphous silicon under long-term operation. Its wider bandgap is much more suitable for solar cell applications than the narrow indirect bandgap of single crystalline silicon. Furthermore, silicon nanostructuring may provide the means for achieving a bandgap-engineered material to be used in tandem solar cells. Silicon nanoparticles of appropriate sizes or superlattices of Si/SiO2, Si/SiGe, and/or Si/C can be integrated with other materials with appropriate bandgap, such as amorphous silicon, polycrystalline silicon, or single crystalline silicon to manufacture stacked solar cells. These types of solar cells can provide a variation of the effective bandgap across the material, allowing a significant portion of the solar spectrum to be efficiently coupled into the device and produce electricity.
Nanotubular-structured porous silicon
Published in Klaus D. Sattler, Silicon Nanomaterials Sourcebook, 2017
For example, amorphous silicon (a-Si) and nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si) [3] have been used as solar cell materials as they are cheaper than c-Si. The guest-free silicon clathrate Si136 and open-framework Si24 were successfully synthesized by thermal the decomposition of alkali metal silicides under the high vacuum [4–6]. Both Si136 and Si24 have a wide band gap, for example, 1.9 eV, and 1.3 eV, respectively [4,6,7]. Some allotropes, such as allo-Si, Si-CFS, fourfold-coordinated clathrate Si, and other structures, were predated by computational calculations [7,8,9]. Almost all of these possesses an indirect band gap (except Si24 has a “quasidirect” band gap [6]) and such a band gap causes a poor carrier mobility and a low quantum efficiency. However, these unique structures would be of interest for gas and lithium storage or for molecular filters.
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Published in Sergio Pizzini, Defects in Nanocrystals, 2020
As is already well-known, nanocrystalline silicon could be prepared as a powder of individual nanocrystallites (NCs), or as nanocrystalline films and nanowires, mostly using plasma-assisted processes with silane (SiH4) or fluorosilane (SiF4) as the precursors.
Methods of extracting silica and silicon from agricultural waste ashes and application of the produced silicon in solar cells: a mini-review
Published in International Journal of Sustainable Engineering, 2021
Fortunate Farirai, Maxwell Ozonoh, Thomas Chinedu Aniokete, Orevaoghene Eterigho-Ikelegbe, Mathew Mupa, Benson Zeyi, Michael Olawale Daramola
Nanocrystalline silicon has been proven to be a viable material for use in Photovoltaics. The growth process for traditional nanocrystalline silicon involves hydrogen dilution, which harms the amorphous material’s performance or post-process annealing, which adds another step to the growth process. Decoupling the growth of a-Si and SiNPs solves this problem (Klafehn 2016).