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DOE OSTI · 3001524

Probing Ultrafast Charge Transfer Dynamics in Heterostructured Nanomaterials

Vura-Weis, Joshua [Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)]
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Abstract

The increasing demand for renewable and low‐cost energy has triggered a vast amount of research aimed at developing, characterizing and optimizing materials that can efficiently convert sun light into useful chemical energy in the form of electricity or chemical fuels. So‐ called quantum dot sensitized solar cell (QDSC) materials have gained much attention in recent years based on the advantageous physicochemical properties of semiconducting quantum dots (QDs) as sensitizers, as well as their promising potential to increase the conversion efficiency beyond the Shockley‐Queisser limit of ∼33% by making use of hot‐electron transfer (HET) routes and multiple exciton generation (MEG). By finely tuning the size of the QDs, the band gap can be carefully aligned to the metal oxide (MO) conduction band such that charge transfer from the photoexcited QD is thermodynamically favorable.

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14 SOLAR ENERGY36 MATERIALS SCIENCE

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Vura-Weis, Joshua [Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL (United States)]. 2025-11-12. Probing Ultrafast Charge Transfer Dynamics in Heterostructured Nanomaterials. https://doi.org/10.2172/3001524

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