Achieving bulk-like charge carrier mobilities in semiconductor nanowires is a major challenge facing the development of nanowire-based electronic devices. Here we demonstrate that engineering the GaAs nanowire surface by overcoating with optimized AlGaAs shells is an effective means of obtaining exceptionally high carrier mobilities and lifetimes. We performed measurements of GaAs/AlGaAs core-s...

In this work a comparison between plasma-induced defects by two different SF6 texturing techniques, reactive ion etching (RIE) and high-density plasma (HDP) is presented. It is found that without any defect-removal etching (DRE), the minority carrier lifetime is the highest for the HDP technique. After DRE, the minority carrier lifetime rises as high as 750 ms for both RIEand HDP-textured wafer...

Iron is a well-known and detrimental impurity in crystalline silicon (c-Si) for solar cells [1], especially in blockcast multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si). So far, most measurement techniques used to determine the spatial distribution of interstitial iron (Fei) in B-doped silicon wafers are based on measurements of the carrier lifetimes or diffusion lengths before and after iron–boron (FeB) pair...

Scaling properties of two photon absorption, free carrier scattering, Raman scattering and Kerr effect in silicon waveguides is reported. It is shown that the dependence of minority carrier lifetime on waveguide dimensions has a profound impact on the performance of nonlinear optical devices built using silicon waveguides.

We report radial heterojunction solar cells of amorphous silicon on crystalline silicon microwires with high surface passivation. While the shortened collection path is exploited to increase the photocurrent, proper choice of the wire radius and the highly passivated surface prevent drastic decrease in the voltage due to high surface-to-volume ratio. The heterojunction is formed by depositing a...

The impact of post-deposition hydrogen plasma treatment (HPT) on passivation in amorphous/crystalline silicon (a-Si:H/c-Si) interfaces is investigated. Combining low temperature a-Si:H deposition and HPT, a high effective charge carrier lifetime > 8ms is achieved on c-Si<100>, which serves as model for surfaces promoting epitaxy of a-Si:H. It is shown that the passivation improvement stems from...

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OBJECTIVE To examine the cost-effectiveness of prenatal carrier screening for cystic fibrosis. METHODS A cost-benefit equation was developed that was based on the hypothesis that the cost of prenatal diagnosis required to diagnose and prevent one case of cystic fibrosis should be equal to or less than the lifetime cost generated from the birth of a neonate with cystic fibrosis. The formula wa...

This chapter gives an overview of the theoretical bases of surface passivation and antireflection coating and describes the methods and equipment used to characterize the layers created in this work. While surface passivation is quantified by the effective surface recombination velocity Seff , this parameter cannot be measured directly. Instead, the lifetime measurements by QSSPC and ”PCD carri...