ABSTRACT
The operation of solar cell (SC) devices is governed by a large variety of solid-state properties associated with the interplay of optical, electronic, and vibrational degrees of freedom of the component materials. The functionalities of nanostructure solar cell (NSSC) components can be categorized according to the physical degree of freedom. Most potential applications consider exploitation of reduced carrier cooling by engineering the phonon modes in Nanostructures (NSs) such as quantam well superlattice and quantum dot superlattice. The different stages of the Photovoltaic (PV) energy conversion process in NSSC—from the incident photon flux to the extracted charge current—are considered with focus on the modeling requirements imposed by the presence of NS components. The structures that are of interest in NS PV architectures are small compared to the coherence length of sunlight. In general, the extraction of photogenerated charge carriers represents one of the most critical aspects in NS-based PV devices.
