Materials Science Seminar

 

 

 

Speaker: Dr Partha Maiti 

 

Title of the Talk: Understanding and Optimizing Charge Carrier Dynamics in Semiconductor Materials for Renewable Energy Applications

 

Date: 9 June 2025, Time 3:00 PM, S N Bose Hall

 

 

 

Abstract: Energy is indispensable for socio-economic life. Low dimensional semiconductor materials in terms of quantum dots, quantum wire, quantum well, etc. are extensively studied in the renewable energy applications because of their exciting photophysical properties. Metal halide perovskites show an emerging class of materials for such applications worldwide owing to their fascinating photophysical properties like remarkable light absorption, long carrier diffusion length, and tunable bandgaps obtained by tailoring the chemical composition. Despite the great progress in optoelectronics devices, particularly in photovoltaic, the hot carrier dynamics with changing dimensionality has not been well explored. Photons that exceed the bandgap’s energy excite the charge carriers to energy levels above the bandgap, whereupon the carriers quickly relax back to the bandgap edge, essentially dissipating all energy in excess of the bandgap. This innate process of rapid hot carrier cooling, preceding the carrier recombination at the bandgap’s edge, is a major source of loss in semiconductor materials that limits their photovoltaic performance. Potentially pushing the solar cell efficiencies beyond the Shockley-Queisser limit that entails overcoming the narrow time window of carrier cooling and addressing the energy-level alignment mismatch preventing the effective extraction of hot carriers from the absorbing semiconductor will be delivered in this talk.