Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have emerged as an innovative solar energy conversion technology which provides a pathway for the development of cheap, renewable and environmentally acceptable energy production (Gledhill, Scott et al., 2005; O'Regan & Grätzel, 1991; Shaheen, Ginley et al., 2005). A typical DSSC consists of a sensitizing dye chemically anchored to a nanocrystalline wide band ...

Silicon is the most important semiconductor material for electronics industry. However, its indirect bandgap makes it hardly emit light, so its applications in optoelectromcs are limited. Many efforts had been devoted to converting silicon to light-emitting materials, including porous silicon-based devices, nanociystalline Si, and so on. In this work, we report electroluminescence on silicon wi...

Catalysts play a significant role in clean renewable hydrogen fuel generation through water splitting reaction as the surface of most semiconductors proper for water splitting has poor performance for hydrogen gas evolution. The catalytic performance strongly depends on the atomic arrangement at the surface, which necessitates the correlation of the surface structure to the catalytic activity i...

Quasi one-dimensional nanowires possess unique electrical, electronic, thermoelectrical, optical, magnetic and chemical properties, which are different from that of their parent counterpart. The physical properties of nanowires are influenced by the morphology of the nanowires, diameter dependent band gap, carrier density of states etc. Nanowires hold lot of promises for different applications....

Anomalous advection-diffusion in two-dimensional semiconductor systems with coexisting energetic and structural disorder is described in the framework of a generalized model of multiple trapping on a comb-like structure. The basic equations of the model contain fractional-order derivatives. To validate the model, we compare analytical solutions with results of a Monte Carlo simulation of phonon...

This study presents the fabrication and characterization of a humidity microsensor that consists of interdigitated electrodes and a sensitive film. The area of the humidity microsensor is about 2 mm(2). The sensitive film is polyaniline doping polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) that is prepared by the sol-gel method, and the film has nanofiber and porous structures that help increase the sensing reaction....

Nowadays, ca. 176,640 tons/year of silicon (Si) (>4N) is manufactured for Si wafers used for semiconductor industry. The production of the highly pure Si wafers inevitably includes very high-temperature steps at 1400-2000 °C, which is energy-consuming and environmentally unfriendly. Inefficiently, ca. 45-55% of such costly Si is lost simply as sawdust in the cutting process. In this work, we de...