ABSTRACT
Nanoscience and nanotechnology have revealed the contemporary doorways to encounter the challenges faced by the traditional solar cells by crafting new materials at nanoscale. This chapter aims to highlight the simplicity and low cost fabrication of emerging nanostructured photovoltaic technologies and their obvious potential for rapid efficiency enhancement in future. Not only the ease and diversity of the fabrication techniques are crucial but also the readily availability of precursor materials helps in cheaper realization of these nanostructured solar cells. Untill today, a number of characterization tools have been developed to explore the light harvesting properties of photoactive and nanostructured materials. These innovative technologies have played significant role in boosting the device stability and power conversion efficiencies through pin pointing the degradation/loss processes at nanoscale. Based on these characterization techniques, every next day novel state-of-the-art ideas are floated into research dome to get deeper insights of working mechanisms for the nanostructured electrodes and to achieve improved device performance. In short, it can be claimed that these emerging solar cells retain a competitive edge over the silicon based photovoltaic devices as they show tremendous performance in diffuse light and therefore, can deliver electricity for both indoor and outdoor usage.
