An organic solar cell based on a poly-3-hexylthiophene (P3HT): phenyl-C61-butyric acid (PCBM) bulk hetero-junction was directly coupled with molybdenum sulfide resulting in the design of a new type of photocathode for the production of hydrogen. Both the light-harvesting system and the catalyst were deposited by low-cost solution-processed methods, i.e. spin coating and spray coating respective...

We introduce an application of thermionic emission in a PMT photocathode. Because of the nonlinear dependence of thermionic emission on absorbed laser power, a conventional PMT is found to produce a virtual pinhole effect that rejects unfocused light at least as strongly as a physical pinhole. This virtual pinhole effect is exploited in a scanning transmission confocal microscope equipped with ...

Abstract It is common practice to test the optical properties of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) by illuminating entire photocathode region from front at once and measuring average performance. However, for optimal utilisation PMT performance in experiments, especially single-photon region, it essential also know systematic variations across photocathode, which requires measurements with focused l...

Solar water splitting is a promising technique for harvesting solar energy and converting abundant sunlight into storable hydrogen fuel. The cuprous oxide photocathode, one of the best-performing photocathodes, possesses theoretical photocurrent density up to 14.7 mA cm ?2 photovoltage as large 1.6 V, making it possible convert in low-cost way. Herein, comprehensive review improving performance...

A method of discharge initiation at an undervoltage by a laser-induced pulse of electrons from a photocathode is presented. The intended application is to produce spatially uniform current sheet initiation in gas-fed pulsed plasma thrusters. The effect is explained by a space charge buildup which can increase the electric field of the gap. A theoretical model was developed and showed that an in...

Current experimental physics programs at a number of electron accelerator laboratories worldwide require the delivery of high average current highly polarized electron beams for long periods of time. The polarized electrons are produced by near bandgap photoemission from certain semiconductor photocathodes. We observe the quantum efficiency of these cathodes to be inversely related to the total...

Amorphous Si (a-Si)/crystalline Si (c-Si) heterojunction (SiHJ) can serve as highly efficient and robust photoelectrodes for solar fuel generation. Low carrier recombination in the photoelectrodes leads to high photocurrents and photovoltages. The SiHJ was designed and fabricated into both photoanode and photocathode with high oxygen and hydrogen evolution efficiency, respectively, by simply co...

We investigated the effect of an accelerating field on the spin polarization of photogenerated electrons in a 100nm thick GaAs based photocathode active region. By decreasing the transport time of the electrons and the number of scattering events that cause depolarization, we expected to increase the polarization as was indicated by Monte Carlo simulations of the scattering and transport time s...

We have developed a new photomultiplier tube (PMT) with high sensitivity for a wavelength-shifter fiber readout of plastic scintillators. Improvements of the photoelectron yield were made on a 2-in. PMT (Hamamatsu R329) by adopting (1) a prism-shaped photocathode, (2) an extended-green photocathode material, and (3) an optical mirror surface of the electrodes. As a result, the number of photoel...

The High-Brightness Electron Source Lab (HBESL) at Fermilab operates an L-band RF gun (1.3-GHz) that incorporates a Cesium Telluride (Cs2Te) photocathode illuminated by an ultra-short (sub-100 fs) laser pulses. In this contribution we report recent studies on exploring the electron beam emission using 800 nm laser pulses (instead of the 266 nm nominal wavelength used for linear photoemission). ...