| Abstract |
The aim of this proposal is to provide design rules for photonic and plasmonic structures that can enhance the efficiency of thin-film solar cells using computer simulations and various minimization algorithms to solve Maxwell’s equations. The proposal is based on: (i) the emerging field of nanophotonics and plasmonics, which allow us to control light on the nanometer scale, (ii) advances in chemical synthesis that has resulted in a huge variety of colloidal building blocks, which can self-assemble into nanostructured materials, and (iii) progress that has been made by our simulation group in developing new computational algorithms to predict crystal structures and self-assembly of arbitrarily shaped particles. We plan to study by computer simulations not only the self-assembly of anisotropic particles, but we will also compute the photonic and plasmonic properties of the resulting self-assembled structures and their ability to trap light in photovoltaic cells. The ultimate goal is to provide generic rules for colloidal particles that self-assemble into structures which enhance light trapping and solar-cell efficiency. |
