Investigation of confined electron gas in a quantum well structure with photovoltaic application

TL;DR

This study models the quantum well electron gas in GaAs/AlGaAs structures to evaluate photovoltaic performance, finding that quantum wells moderately enhance solar cell parameters by extending absorption into longer wavelengths.

Contribution

It introduces a computational scheme to analyze confined electron gases in quantum wells and links this to photovoltaic performance improvements.

Findings

Quantum wells extend absorption edge to longer wavelengths.

Moderate enhancement in photovoltaic parameters due to quantum wells.

Confirmation of bound states via conductance studies.

Abstract

The growth-diection quantization of confined electron gas in a GaAs/AlGaAs based quantum well structure is obtained in the Kohn-Sham iterative computational scheme. The longitudinal conductance at low temperatures, in the presence of magnetic field applied in the same direction, is studied to confirm the presence of the bound-states obtained through this scheme. The sub-band absorption is calculated by a frequently used approximation modeling the absorption as a convolution between spectral functions. The absorption coefficient is used to obtain photovoltaic performance related parameters of a quantum well solar cell. When compared to a device without the quantum wells, it is found that the additional carrier generation in the wells due to extension of absorption edge into longer wavelengths brings about moderate enhancement in the values of these parameters.