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Although the solar-thermal technology has opened up a potential green energy harvesting method, it is challenging to suppress the non-negligible energy dissipation while maintaining a high absorbance. Most disordered organic polymers are almost incapable of limiting the absorption in the desired cutoff wavelength range, which is detrimental to the design of selective absorbers. Moreover, the development of absorbers with a periodic plasmonic nanostructure is always lacking in cost-effective scalability. Herein, we report a scalable selective absorber with a quasiperiodic nanostructure composed by an economical widespread surface self-assembly of densely arranged Fe3O4 nano-particles, possessing a high-performance energy conversion for low-grade solar energy. By investigating the scale effect of the quasiperiodic densely arranged plasmonic nanostructure, a significant solar absorption >94% and ideal passive suppression of thermal emissivity <0.2 can be obtained simultaneously. With the synergy of material properties, thermal management, and environmental effect, a flexible planar solar thermoelectric harvester is demonstrated under natural sunlight (AM1.5G), reaching a significant sustaining open-circuit voltage of >20 mV/cm2, without a heat sink. This highly versatile strategy is expected to lead the exploration of energy evolution in fundamental research and pioneer next-generation, high-performance, economical, and practical solar co-harvesting systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

P-type transparent conductive materials (TCMs) are urgently needed in the development of photoelectric devices. In particular, the P-type TCMs that can be applied in the mid-infrared range are even rarer due to the conflict between the transparent range and the conductivity of materials. In this work, a P-type mid-infrared transparent conductive LaSe2 film is obtained by a two-step method combining the RF sputtering and a selenized annealing process. The crystal structure of the film has been confirmed by x-ray diffraction and Raman spectrum analysis. According to the Hall effect measurement results, the LaSe2 film has a higher conductivity (about 3.6 S/cm) than that of traditional P-type mid-infrared TCMs, which is attributed to its ten times higher carrier concentration (about 1019 cm−3) and a much smaller hole effective mass (about 0.34 me) compared to the conventional P-type mid-infrared TCMs. The transmittance (about 75%) is at the same level as that of the traditional P-type mid-infrared TCMs. In a sense, the LaSe2 is a promising candidate material for the development of mid-infrared photoelectric devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]