Electronic and thermal transport in hot carrier solar cells with low-dimensional contacts

Hot carrier solar cells are a third generation solar cell device where electrons and holes, heated by solar radiation, are removed from the absorber via low-dimensional energy selective contacts before they can thermalise to the band edge. Here, a new model is presented for calculating the performance of these devices, which takes into account the energy spectrum of the contacts. It is shown that efficiency is maximised with a certain ideal number of contacts and that the energy spectra of these should be narrow. Crown Copyright (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.