Principal Investigator Jeffrey Grossman
Project Website http://www.rle.mit.edu/gg/research/photovoltaics/
Photovoltaics involves converting sunlight directly into electricity using suitable semiconductor materials. Our group focuses on a variety of such semiconducting materials to capture sunlight and fabricate devices to convert the captured sunlight into electricity. Current projects in this area include:
(1) Quantum dot (QD) solar cells: Computational study and experimental synthesis/characterization of QDs such as PbS, PbSe for efficient QD solar cells (in collaboration with other groups at MIT).
(2) 2D Photovoltaics: Exploiting the exotic properties of novel two-dimensional materials such as MoS2, MoSe2, graphene etc. to fabricate solar cells that are about a nanometer thick in size. Such solar cells exhibit high energy densities and enable the possibility of fabricating paper-like solar cells.
(3) Amorphous Si (a-Si) solar cells: Understanding the process of hole mobility in a-Si using computational and experimental techniques, enabling efficient a-Si solar cells.
(4) 3D-PV architectures: Exploration of three dimensional solar architectures of different shapes and sizes using commercially available flat solar cell panels. Such optimized 3D structures show better stability and reliability when it comes to power management.