Abstract
Solar energy is abundant, clean, and renewable, making it an ideal energy source. Solar cells are a good option to harvest this energy. However, it is difficult to balance the cost and efficiency of traditional thin-film solar cells, whereas nanowires (NW) are far superior in making high-efficiency low-cost solar cells. Therefore, the NW solar cell has attracted great attention in recent years and is developing rapidly. Here, we review the great advantages, recent breakthroughs, novel designs, and remaining challenges of NW solar cells. Special attention is given to (but not limited to) the popular semiconductor NWs for solar cells, in particular, Si, GaAs(P), and InP.
Highlights
The demand for energy is accelerating exponentially due to the global population growth and economic development
More than 70% of the light was absorbed at angles of incidence up to 60◦, which was significantly better than thin films (45%)
Compared with thin-film/planar/bulk materials, NWs can allow the integration of high-quality materials with good opto-electrical properties, such as III–Vs, onto cheap Si substrates, providing a highly-promising method to build high-efficiency, low-cost solar cells
Summary
The demand for energy is accelerating exponentially due to the global population growth and economic development. Semiconductor nanowires (NWs) have lots of novel mechanical, optical and electronic properties that are not present in the thin-film counterparts [12,13,14,15,16], which can provide a highly promising solution to build the high-efficiency and low-cost solar cells on Si as mentioned above [17,18]. They can add new functionalities to solar cells [13,19]. Ref [13,23,24], photocatalytic energy conversion can be found in Ref [25], and basic fundamentals can be found in Ref [26,27,28,29]
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