Live Poster Session: Zoom Link
Thursday, July 30th 1:15-2:30pm EDT
Abstract: A major goal in the field of solar technology is to find semiconductors that can be used to make solar panels that are cheaper or more efficient than solar panels on the market. One of the properties of a material that indicates whether the semiconductor is a good candidate for solar cell usage is known as the recombination lifetime, a measure of how long a material remains conductive after being excited by a pulse of energy. Longer lifetimes are ideal as they give excited electrons in the semiconductor sufficient time to flow out of the solar cell, where the energy of the electrons is harvested. There are methods to approximate the recombination lifetime, but to do it more precisely, the three recombination rates of the material must be known. However, the recombination rates are difficult to locate as they are elements of a differential equation that isn’t analytically solvable. We wrote a program in MATLAB that can take time-resolved terahertz spectroscopy recombination data and determine the recombination rates of the examined material using a least squares curve fitting. Using this program, we analyzed the data we had collected in the spring and learned that spectroscopy data with the laser running at a higher power will be more suited to this form of analysis than our current data sets. Moving forward, this recombination rate program will provide our lab with another tool to utilize when analyzing promising solar cell materials.
OBrien-Summer-Poster-Final-Draft-Kellen-OBrienLive Poster Session: Zoom Link
Thursday, July 30th 1:15-2:30pm EDT