Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SC2-O022 Invited Talk
UTILIZING THE POTENTIALS OF HETEROSTRUCTURES FOR
EFFICIENT SOLAR ENERGY CONVERSION
Oomman Varghese 1 , Ram Neupane 1 , Maggie Paulose 1
1 University of Houston, Department of Physics, United States.
Facilitating affordable localized power production is a useful strategy to make
electricity accessible to population that live in remote and underdeveloped
areas in the world. In order to achieve it practically through sustainable
pathways, which is one of the goals of the United Nations Organization, solar
based electricity and fuel production technologies should be made more
efficient or affordable or both. Low cost materials and fabrication technologies
often pose device quality problems such as poor efficiency and device instability.
There is a need to solve the challenges associated with existing materials or
develop new materials and approaches to make solar technologies viable and
affordable for majority of the population. Low cost stable materials capable of
converting sunlight into electricity or fuel, in general, have problems such as
poor light absorption in a wide energy range and high recombination rate of
light generated charge carriers. Use of a combination of materials having
complementary functions in an inorganic-inorganic or organic-inorganic
heterostructure configuration is an effective strategy. We have successfully
implemented this strategy to develop some novel configurations of
nanostructures and thin films of abundant and inexpensive materials to
enhance the efficiencies of solar fuel and solar cell technologies. These materials
and configurations are discussed in this presentation.
Keywords: Heterostructure, Photovoltaics, Water Splitting
Presenting authors email: okvarghese@uh.edu