Abstract

The hot carrier solar cell is a promising concept for high efficiency photovoltaics. Obtaining the dynamic temperature information for the hot carriers in an absorber is of crucial importance to this concept. In this paper, we present a dynamical hot carrier theory that extracts the carrier temperature and the instantaneous carrier occupation from transient absorption spectra. We have applied this model to two transition metal nitride materials, HfN and ZrN. The analysis showed that for HfN the initial carrier temperature rose to 360K immediately after a femtosecond pulse excitation and then dropped rapidly to 330K within 0.13ps. After this initial process, the carrier temperature still remained relatively elevated at above 320K for as long as 2ns. The initial fast process was attributed to the strong carrier–carrier scattering in the material while the slow decay of temperature might be due to unusually weak electron–phonon interactions. A shorter cooling time and overall lower hot carrier temperatures were observed in ZrN.

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