Academic literature on the topic 'Nanopillar Transparent Electrodes'

Metal/semiconductor and transparent conductive oxide (TCO)/semiconductor heterojunctions have emerged as an effective modality in the fabrication of photoelectric devices. This review is following a recent shift toward the engineering of TCO layers and structured Si substrates, incorporating metal nanoparticles for the development of next-generation photoelectric devices. Beneficial progress which helps to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost, has been sequenced based on efficient technologies involved in making novel substrates, TCO layers, and electrodes. The electrical and optical properties of indium tin oxide (ITO) and aluminum doped zinc oxide (AZO) thin films can be enhanced by structuring the surface of TCO layers. The TCO layers embedded with Ag nanoparticles are used to enhance the plasmonic light trapping effect in order to increase the energy harvesting nature of photoelectric devices. Si nanopillar structures which are fabricated by photolithography-free technique are used to increase light-active surface region. The importance of the structure and area of front electrodes and the effect of temperature at the junction are the value added discussions in this review.

Global warming is pushing the world to seek to green energy sources and hydrogen is a good candidate to substitute fossil fuels in the short term. In future, it is expected that production of hydrogen will be carried out through photo-electrocatalysis. In this way, suitable electrodes that acts as photoanode absorbing the incident light are needed to catalyse water splitting reaction. Hematite (α-Fe2O3) is one of the most attractive semiconductors for this purpose since it is a low-cost material and it has a suitable band gap of 2.1 eV, which allows the absorption of the visible region. Although, hematite has drawbacks such as low carrier mobility and short holes diffusion lengths, that here it has been tried to overcome by nanoengineering the material, and by using a semiconductor as a scaffold that enhances charge carrier separation processes in the electrode. In this work, we fabricate ultrathin quasi transparent electrodes composed by highly ordered and self-standing hematite nanopillars of a few tens of nanometers length on FTO and TiO2 supports. Photoanodes were fabricated utilizing electron beam evaporation technique and anodized aluminum oxide templates with well-defined pores diameters. Thus, the activity of the compact layer hematite photoanode is compared with the photoanodes fabricated with nanopillars of controllable diameters (i.e., 90, 260 and 400 nm) to study their influence on charge separation processes. Results indicated that optimal α-Fe2O3 photoanodes performance are obtained when nanopillars reach hundreds of nanometers in diameter, achieving for photoanodes with 400 nm nanopillars onto TiO2 supports the highest photocurrent density values.

The indium tin oxide (ITO) has been widely applied in light emitting diodes (LEDs) as the transparent current spreading layer. In this work, the performance of GaN-based blue light LEDs with nanopatterned ITO electrode is investigated. Periodic nanopillar ITO arrays are fabricated by inductive coupled plasma etching with the mask of polystyrene nanosphere. The light extraction efficiency (LEE) of LEDs can be improved by nanopatterned ITO ohmic contacts. The light output intensity of the fabricated LEDs with nanopatterned ITO electrode is 17% higher than that of the conventional LEDs at an injection current of 100 mA. Three-dimensional finite difference time domain simulation matches well with the experimental result. This method may serve as a practical approach to improving the LEE of the LEDs.

Abstract:Interest in patterned polymer-based flexible nanodevices and sub-100 nm metal and transparent conducting nanostructured electrodes have led us to modify the traditional nanoimprint lithography technique to enable fabrication of an array of sub-100 nm diameter electrode structures. Transparent conducting electrodes (TCOs) are fabricated by coating one or multiple TCO layers of choice on top of a polymer nanostructured scaffold of appropriate dimension. By optimizing the thickness of each of these layers one may tune and optimize the trade-off between the conductivity and transparency of the sample. Incorporation of plasmonic materials such as Ag leads to interplay of localized and tunable surface plasmon resonances within the TCO structures. At plasmon resonance the reflection of the sample is minimized and absorption in the TCO structures dominates. Experimental and simulated reflection spectra of these structures are in good agreement, including the appearance of sharp spectral features that are absent in a simple planar analog. The simulated Brewster angle of the nanopillars decreases compared to the planar reference sample by up to 10-13 degrees depending on the height of the pillars and indicates a reduced effective refractive index. The depolarization factor obtained by ellipsometry is about 0.05, as anticipated for ellipsoidal pillars.

Organic photovoltaic devices have evinced interest due to the prospects of integrating strongly absorbing semiconducting polymers in flexible, light weight device platforms with ease of fabrication. However, there are significant performance issues to be addressed in these devices which include issues at the pixel level and those at the panel level. In this thesis, we address design and fabrication issues in the context of two distinct problems – that of enhancing optoelectronic performance at the pixel level using nanostructured platforms, and that of identifying and modelling catastrophic failure mechanisms in these devices. A major part of the thesis deals with the enhancement of optoelectronic performance using a nanostructured photovoltaic architecture. Based on design insights from optical transport studies on a photovoltaic architecture with Nano-pillars, an optimized nanostructured platform is designed and fabricated for optoelectronic enhancement. A two-step template based melding process to obtain nanostructured substrates based on novel mouldable transparent materials, on which we demonstrate broadband light trapping. We show that this design brings about dual advantages – firstly an enhancement in the absorption through trapped surface plasmon modes at the absorber-electrode interface and bulk guided modes in the active layer, and secondly an improved charge separation due to enhanced built in fields. Subsequently the problem of material optimization is considered where the combined effects of the nanostructured geometry and the optoelectronic properties of the absorber layer are studied using simulations. In the remainder of the thesis, problems relating to identification, characterization, and modelling of catastrophic failure in device are addressed. Coupled electro-thermal processes are shown to be at the root of structural damage, which results in two distinct types of structural defects in the device. We develop an analytical model to evaluate the failure criteria, which shows excellent agreement with the experimentally observed defects. Using these models, one could design robust devices for large panels, where thermally initiated issues pose a challenge.