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Funding Information: This work was financially supported by NanoLund, Myfab, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Energy Agency, and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society. Nanowire solar cells have the potential to reach the same efficiencies as the world-record III-V solar cells while using a fraction of the material. For solar energy harvesting, large-area nanowire solar cells have to be processed. In this work, we demonstrate the synthesis of epitaxial InP nanowire arrays on a 2 inch wafer. We define five array areas with different nanowire diameters on the same wafer. We use a photoluminescence mapper to characterize the sample optically and compare it to a homogeneously exposed reference wafer. Both steady-state and time-resolved photoluminescence maps are used to study the material's quality. From a mapping of reflectance spectra, we simultaneously extract the diameter and length of the nanowires over the full wafer. The extracted knowledge of large-scale nanowire synthesis will be crucial for the upscaling of nanowire-based solar cells, and the demonstrated wafer-scale characterization methods will be central for quality control during manufacturing.

Space power systems require photovoltaics that are lightweight, efficient, reliable, and capable of operating for years or decades in space environment. Current solar panels use planar multijunction, III-V based solar cells with very high efficiency, but their specific power (power to weight ratio) is limited by the added mass of radiation shielding (e.g., coverglass) required to protect the cells from the high-energy particle radiation that occurs in space. Here, we demonstrate that III-V nanowire-array solar cells have dramatically superior radiation performance relative to planar solar cell designs and show this for multiple cell geometries and materials, including GaAs and InP. Nanowire cells exhibit damage thresholds ranging from ∼10-40 times higher than planar control solar cells when subjected to irradiation by 100-350 keV protons and 1 MeV electrons. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that this improvement is due in part to a reduction in the displacement density within the wires arising from their nanoscale dimensions. Radiation tolerance, combined with the efficient optical absorption and the improving performance of nanowire photovoltaics, indicates that nanowire arrays could provide a pathway to realize high-specific-power, substrate-free, III-V space solar cells with substantially reduced shielding requirements. More broadly, the exceptional reduction in radiation damage suggests that nanowire architectures may be useful in improving the radiation tolerance of other electronic and optoelectronic devices.

We report reproducible fabrication of InP-InAsP nanowire light emitting diodes in which electron-hole recombination is restricted to a quantum-dot-sized InAsP section. The nanowire geometry naturally self-aligns the quantum dot with the n-InP and p-InP ends of the wire, making these devices promising candidates for electrically-driven quantum optics experiments. We have investigated the operation of these nano-LEDs with a consistent series of experiments at room temperature and at 10 K, demonstrating the potential of this system for single photon applications.

We have studied the vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth dynamics of GaP and GaAs in heterostructured GaP-GaAs nanowires. The wires containing multiple GaP-GaAs junctions were grown by the use of metal-organic vapor phase-epitaxy (MOVPE) on SiO2, and the lengths of the individual sections were obtained from transmission electron microscopy. The growth kinetics has been studied as a function of temperature and the partial pressures of the precursors. We found that the growth of the GaAs sections is limited by the arsine (AsH3) as well as the trimethylgallium (Ga(CH 3)3) partial pressures, whereas the growth of GaP is a temperature-activated, phosphine(PH3)-limited process with an activation energy of 115 ± 6 kJ/mol. The PH3 kinetics obeys the Hinshelwood-Langmuir mechanism, indicating that the dissociation reaction of adsorbed PH3 into PH2 and H on the catalytic gold surface is the rate-limiting step for the growth of GaP. In addition, we have studied the competitive thin layer growth on the sidewalls of the nanowires. Although the rate of this process is 2 orders of magnitude lower than the growth rate of the VLS mechanism, it competes with VLS growth and results in tapered nanowires at elevated temperatures. © 2006 American Chemical Society. U7 - Export Date: 2 August 2010 U7 - Source: Scopus