Talk:Quantum dot solar cell

Untitled
What is written here sounds like bullshit to me. Quantum dots are added to bulky solar cells, having similar impact as multijunction solar cells. Only the bandgap is determined by their size rather than their material. I suggest deleting this article since the article "Solar cell" (which I didn`t write) is much better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Omer Korech (talk • contribs) 19:31, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

^ With regards to the above, I've completely rewritten the article and added a couple of references too. 137.73.127.114 12:45, 29 January 2007 (UTC)Darren L

Toxicity is not the End
If this is going to be an objective article, the last statement that toxic quantum dots will make this technology impractical should be removed since many experts would disagree. CdTe is already used commercially on a large scale, and this has been possible because it has been found that the chances of toxic materials leaving the solar cell and entering the environment are small. The same may be true of PbSe, and in general toxic materials do not signal the end for a technology. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.240.20.131 (talk) 03:06, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree and I took out that statement. I checked and it was added a couple years ago by an account that has since been banned. --174.115.239.35 (talk) 02:57, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Confusion
This article is slightly confusing. how are these cells different (or the same) as say a monocrystalline silicon cell?

what do the dots do? are the dots the n layer? I’m not familiar with dye-sensitized cells, so maybe that’s all I have to do to understand - but can't that info be duplicated slightly here in this article to make it more understandable? -Jowe 15:03, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

References lack titles
With all due respect, this article needs a bit of work still. I can Wikify references, but they lack titles of articles. Can anyone fix that? Thx. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mtodorov 69 (talk • contribs) 06:15, 29 April 2007 (UTC). Just want to confirm this impression thatthe current article is a mess. I know a little about semi-conductor processing, and I can tell you that information about spin coating and other processes is almost irrelevant. I appreciate that someone wants to make the point these things are cheaper than alternatrives, but the focus needs to be on what these things are and how they compare to other types of photovoltaic cells. And of course it would help if terms most people are unfamiliar with could be defined or avoided. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.33.43.230 (talk) 19:50, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Please don't hesitate to propose an update, either by boldly editing the article, or, if not sure about the text operators, just post a draft here, with references :-). I am always ready to help, at least with the formatting, just haven't got the time to rewrite myself. Materialscientist (talk) 00:24, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Problems

 * In a radio, the valve does not "traps the electrons as they pop off the end of the antenna". It rectifies the signal.
 * Solar cells are not exactly radios. They convert energy. Radios recover information not caring for energy. Induction coils are closer than radios to solar cells.
 * The spectral part is more or less correctly explained in Shockley–Queisser limit, but not in this article. Photons with energy below band gap are lost. Photons with energy above band gap are not lost; their energy is partly lost (into heat) because the produced electron-hole pair thermalizes to the bottom of the conduction/valence band. It is not that simple and high-energy photons can generate more than one e-h pair (see below).
 * The radio part is gone, but the first 2 paragraphs of the updated "background" need complete rewriting (too sleepy to do that now). DYK-wise, the article is under-referenced (1 ref/para rule). Materialscientist (talk) 14:14, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Quickfixed. Materialscientist (talk) 11:43, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
 * 21 paras, 22 refs. Intros don't count. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:34, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Actually, that's not a rule anyway... Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:36, 28 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Band gap in QDs can be modulated from the value of the bulk material to higher energies. Thus PbS can't extend into far infrared simply because its bulk band gap is 0.41 eV.
 * It is hardly correct to say that QDs are easier to make than bulk materials - they are easier to make than high-quality semiconducting crystals, which have high carrier mobility. The mobility in QD solar cells is not discussed in the article.
 * Most of "current research" is written in a newspaper style rather than encyclopedic style. Random examples "Members of the Sargent Group from the University of Toronto, experts in the preparation of quantum dots, visited the lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne to explore this concept, but they found that the quantum dots tended to form a layer on top of the TiO2 film instead of being taken up into its interior. " Ugh .. what did they eat there ;-) "During this period, other teams were working with nanocrystals of other semiconductors" - what period, what teams, what semiconductors.
 * This section is seriously flawed and I don't have enough time to rewrite it, as it requires searching for proper sources. Just one example "Experiments at the Rochester Institute of Technology have shown greatly increased IR sensitivity using indium arsenide dots on GaAs cells". The actual ref shows an increase of about 1% (from 16 to 17 or so). The 5.6% figure is currently not supported and I doubt it is correct. Materialscientist (talk) 11:43, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Ref. 13 is dead. Ref. 12 does not link to the original title and is much too superficial. The original ref is and an earlier work is actually . It is not that rosy: 3 excitons are created for a photon of 4 x bandgap, and the process has a threshold photon energy.
 * Fixed these refs. Materialscientist (talk) 14:14, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Impenetrable sentence in lead
The sentence "Chemically engineering the nanocrystal surface can better passivate the nanocrystals and reduce detrimental trap states that would curtail device performance by means of carrier recombination." is weaselly technobabble and needs clarification. It is virtually meaningless except possibly to aficionados of the technology. Plantsurfer (talk) 08:13, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

I would concur in general. There is a good bit of equivocation in this article between what are the properties of a quantum dot, and what is poorly supported hypothesis (single papers calculating a hoped-for property do not establish an efficiency). Also - what does the record efficiency of other "tandem cells" have to do with that of the present QDSC's? It is included as though it were somehow related. Wikibearwithme (talk) 04:15, 19 February 2018 (UTC) .

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 one external links on Quantum dot solar cell. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20110128075153/http://www.engineering.utoronto.ca/About/Engineering_in_the_News/08_10_2010d.htm to http://www.engineering.utoronto.ca/About/Engineering_in_the_News/08_10_2010d.htm
 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20061031145807/http://www.lbl.gov:80/tt/techs/lbnl2116.html to http://www.lbl.gov/tt/techs/lbnl2116.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 12:44, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Nanocrystal solar cell. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-files-englisch/photovoltaics-report-slides.pdf
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20061031145807/http://www.lbl.gov/tt/techs/lbnl2116.html to http://www.lbl.gov/tt/techs/lbnl2116.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 07:20, 12 February 2018 (UTC)