Journal
NANO LETTERS
Volume 13, Issue 8, Pages 3664-3670Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/nl401544y
Keywords
Monolayer materials; graphene; transition metal dichalcogenides; solar energy; sunlight absorption; photovoltaics
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Funding
- CINECA through the ISCRA-C [HP10CMAA6K]
- FP7 ITN Clermont4 [235114]
- MITEI Seed Fund
- MISTI program
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Graphene and monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are promising materials for next-generation ultrathin optoelectronic devices. Although visually transparent, graphene is an excellent sunlight absorber, achieving 2.3% visible light absorbance in just 3.3 angstrom thickness. TMD monolayers also hold potential as sunlight absorbers, and may enable ultrathin photovoltaic (PV) devices due to their semi-conducting character. In this work, we show that the three TMD monolayers MoS2, MoSe2, and WS2 can absorb up to 5-10% incident sunlight in a thickness of less than 1 nm, thus achieving 1 order of magnitude higher sunlight absorption than GaAs and Si. We further study PV devices based on just two stacked monolayers: (1) a Schottky barrier solar cell between MoS2 and graphene and (2) an excitonic solar cell based on a MoS2/WS2 bilayer. We demonstrate that such 1 nm thick active layers can attain power conversion efficiencies of up to similar to 1%, corresponding to approximately 1-3 orders of magnitude higher power densities than the best existing ultrathin solar cells. Our work shows that two-dimensional monolayer materials hold yet untapped potential for solar energy absorption and conversion at the nanoscale.
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