Publications

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We report the demonstration of dilute nitride heterostructure core/shell microwire solar cells utilizing the combination of top-down reactive-ion etching to create the cores (GaP) and molecular beam epitaxy to create the shells (GaNP). Systematic studies of cell performance over a series of microwire lengths, array periods, and microwire sidewall morphologies examined by transmission electron microscopy were conducted to shed light on performance-limiting factors and to optimize the cell efficiency. We show by microscopy and correlated external quantum efficiency characterization that the open circuit voltage is degraded primarily due to the presence of defects at the GaP/GaNP interface and in the GaNP shells, and is not limited by surface recombination. Compared to thin film solar cells in the same growth run, the microwire solar cells exhibit greater short circuit current but poorer open circuit voltage due to greater light absorption and number of defects in the microwire structure, respectively. The comprehensive understanding presented in this work suggests that performance benefits of dilute nitride microwire solar cells can be achieved by further tuning of the epitaxial quality of the underlying materials.

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Epitaxy-enabled bottom-up synthesis of self-assembled planar nanowires via the vapor-liquid-solid mechanism is an emerging and promising approach toward large-scale direct integration of nanowire-based devices without postgrowth alignment. Here, by examining large assemblies of indium tin oxide nanowires on yttria-stabilized zirconia substrate, we demonstrate for the first time that the growth dynamics of planar nanowires follows a modified version of the Gibbs-Thomson mechanism, which has been known for the past decades to govern the correlations between thermodynamic supersaturation, growth speed, and nanowire morphology. Furthermore, the substrate orientation strongly influences the growth characteristics of epitaxial planar nanowires as opposed to impact at only the initial nucleation stage in the growth of vertical nanowires. The rich nanowire morphology can be described by a surface-energy-dependent growth model within the Gibbs-Thomson framework, which is further modulated by the tin doping concentration. Our experiments also reveal that the cutoff nanowire diameter depends on the substrate orientation and decreases with increasing tin doping concentration. These results enable a deeper understanding and control over the growth of planar nanowires, and the insights will help advance the fabrication of self-assembled nanowire devices.

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Battery cycle life is directly influenced by the microstructural changes occurring in the electrodes during charge and discharge cycles. Here, we image in situ the nanoscale phase evolution in negative electrode materials for Li-ion batteries using a fully enclosed liquid cell in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) to reveal early degradation that is not evident in the charge-discharge curves. To compare the electrochemical phase transformation behavior between three model materials, thin films of amorphous Si, crystalline Al, and crystalline Au were lithiated and delithiated at controlled rates while immersed in a commercial liquid electrolyte. This method allowed for the direct observation of lithiation mechanisms in nanoscale negative electrodes, revealing that a simplistic model of a surface-to-interior lithiation front is insufficient. For the crystalline films, a lithiation front spread laterally from a few initial nucleation points, with continued grain nucleation along the growing interface. The intermediate lithiated phases were identified using electron diffraction, and high-resolution postmortem imaging revealed the details of the final microstructure. Our results show that electrochemically induced solid-solid phase transformations can lead to highly concentrated stresses at the laterally propagating phase boundary which should be considered for future designs of nanostructured electrodes for Li-ion batteries.

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Advanced semiconductor devices often utilize structural and geometrical effects to tailor their characteristics and improve their performance. We report here detailed understanding of such geometrical effects in the epitaxial selective area growth of GaN on sapphire substrates and utilize them to enhance light extraction from GaN light emitting diodes. Systematic size and spacing effects were performed side-by-side on a single 2" sapphire substrate to minimize experimental sampling errors for a set of 144 pattern arrays with circular mask opening windows in SiO2. We show that the mask opening diameter leads to as much as 4 times increase in the thickness of the grown layers for 20 μm spacings and that spacing effects can lead to as much as 3 times increase in thickness for a 350 μm dot diameter. We observed that the facet evolution in comparison with extracted Ga adatom diffusion lengths directly influences the vertical and lateral overgrowth rates and can be controlled with pattern geometry. Such control over the facet development led to 2.5 times stronger electroluminescence characteristics from well-faceted GaN/InGaN multiple quantum well LEDs compared to non-faceted structures.

In this work, we demonstrate ∼2.05eV dilute nitride GaNP solar cells on GaP substrates for potential use as the top junction in dual-junction integrated cells on Si. By adding a small amount of N into indirect-bandgap GaP, GaNP has several extremely important attributes: a direct-bandgap that is also tunable, and easily attained lattice-match with Si. Our best GaNP solar cell ([N]∼1.8%, Eg∼2.05eV) achieves an efficiency of 7.9%, even in the absence of a window layer. This GaNP solar cell's efficiency is 3× higher than the most efficient GaP solar cell to date and higher than other solar cells with similar direct bandgap (InGaP, GaAsP). Through a systematic study of the structural, electrical, and optical properties of the device, efficient broadband optical absorption and enhanced solar cell performance are demonstrated.