Abstract
Solar cells typically rely on diamond silicon, but researchers have found that hydrogenated bilayer silicene absorbs visual light better and can be used to create efficient thin-film solar absorbers and silicon-based, white-light-emitting diodes.
Highlights
Silicon is arguably the best electronic material, but it is not a good optoelectronic material
By employing first-principles calculations and the cluster-expansion approach, we discover that hydrogenated bilayer silicene (BS) shows promising potential as a new kind of optoelectronic material
CdTe [6,7], CuðIn; GaÞSe2 [8,9], and Cu2ZnSnðS; SeÞ4 [10,11] based single-junction, thin-film solar cells have been widely studied in the past few decades because these absorbers have promising direct band gaps between 1 and 1.5 eV, which are expected to produce highefficiency solar cells according to the Shockley-Queisser criteria [12]
Summary
Silicon is arguably the best electronic material, but it is not a good optoelectronic material. Four ground states of single- and doublesided hydrogenated BS are characterized by dipole-allowed direct (or quasidirect) band gaps in the desirable range from 1 to 1.5 eV, suitable for solar applications.
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