A group of scientists studying sun powered cells, has discovered Crystalline Fault Line using cadmium telluride, a promising other option to silicon,provide pathway for electric current.This exploration—led at the University of Connecticut and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory- They used Common processing technique,cadmium telluride turns an excellent material for transforming sunlight into electricity,and recommends a methodology for engineering more efficient solar devices that surpass the performance of silicon.
According to co-author Eric Stach, a physicist at Brookhaven Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) said “If you look at semiconductors like silicon, defects in the crystals are usually bad”.As Stach explaned,misplaced atoms or slight shifts in their alignment often act as traps for the particles that carry electric current—negatively charged electrons or the positively charged “holes” left behind when electrons are knocked loose by photons of sunlight, making them more mobile.The idea behind solar cells is to separate the positive and negative charges and run them through a circuit so the current can be used to power houses, satellites, or even cities. Defects interrupt this flow of charges and keep the solar cell from being as efficient as it could be.
But in the case of cadmium telluride, the scientists found that boundaries between individual crystals and “planar defects”—fault-like misalignments in the arrangement of atoms—create pathways for conductivity, not traps.Several groups around the world had looked at the surfaces of such solar cells before, often with a tool known as a conducting atomic force microscope. The microscope has a fine probe many times sharper than the head of a pin that scans across the material’s surface to track the topographic features—the hills and valleys of the surface structure—while simultaneously measuring location-specific conductivity. Scientists use this technique to explore how the surface features relate to solar cell performance at the nanoscale.
But no one had devised a way to make measurements beneath the surface, the most important part of the solar cell. This is where the UConn team made an important breakthrough. They used an approach developed and perfected by Kutes and Luria over the last two years to acquire hundreds of sequential images, each time intentionally removing a nanoscale layer of the material, so they could scan through the entire thickness of the sample. They then used these layer-by-layer images to build up a three-dimensional, high-resolution ‘tomographic’ map of the solar cell—somewhat like a computed tomography (CT) brain scan.
In any case, Stach says that combining the CTAFM technique and electron microscopy, yields a “clear winner” in the search for more efficient, cost-competitive alternatives to silicon solar cells, which have nearly reached their limit for
efficiency.
“There is already a billion-dollar-a-year industry making cadmium telluride solar cells, and lots of work exploring other alternatives to silicon. But all of these alternatives, because of their crystal structure, have a higher tendency to form defects,” he said. “This work gives us a systematic method we can use to understand if the defects are good or bad in terms of conductivity. It can also be used to explore the effects of different processing methods or chemicals to control how defects form. In the case of cadmium telluride, we may want to find ways to make more of these defects, or look for other materials in which defects improve performance.”
Sources :Brookhaven National Laboratory
