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Lanthanide-Doped Ceria Nanoparticles As Backside Coaters To Improve Silicon Solar Cell Efficiency, Ali Hajjiah, Effat Samir, Nader Shehata, Mohamed Salah

Biology Faculty Publications

This paper introduces lanthanide-doped ceria nanoparticles as silicon solar cell back-side coaters, showing their influence on the solar cell efficiency. Ceria nanoparticles can be synthesized to have formed oxygen vacancies (O-vacancies), which are associated with converting cerium ions from the Ce⁴⁺ state ions to the Ce³⁺ ones. These O-vacancies follow the rule of improving silicon solar cell conductivity through a hopping mechanism. Besides, under near-ultra violet (near-UV) excitation, the reduced trivalent cerium Ce³⁺ ions are directly responsible for down converting the un-absorbed UV wavelengths to a resultant green photo-luminescence emission at ~520 nm, which is absorbed through …