Doping Colloidal Quantum Dots to Break the Photophysical Bottlenecks in Solar Cell Applications

Project funded by Swedish Research Council (Grant for positions or stipends), grant 2017-05337_VR. Participating organisations named by the source: Lund University. Funded amount: SEK 4,000,000, as stated by the source. Runs 2018-01-01 to 2021-12-31. Keywords: Naturvetenskap, Natural Sciences, Kemi, Chemical Sciences, Materialkemi, Materials Chemistry. Source: OpenAIRE Graph, from the funder's project data (collected by OpenAIRE on 2025-12-05); national funding data, not CORDIS. Abstract given by the source: Shockley-Queisser thermodynamics limit defines the maximum efficiency of any single-junction cells to be 33%.There is one possible approach to break such efficiency by quantum dots (QDs) to excessive energy above optical band gap through multiple exciton generation (MEG). However, the efficiency of QDs solar cells is far below expectation with state of art record 11.3%. The bottlenecks mainly originate from two parts: inefficient charge transportation due to surface/interface trap states and poor collection efficiency of multicarriers. The emerging transition metal ion doping in QDs provided new opportunities to overcome those limitations. Those doping states exhibit longer lifetime and larger DOS. Moreover, their ferromagnetic feature opens up an extra tool to modulate the photo-physical properties by spin polarization. In this project, we will first design gradually changed defect levels in layer-to-layer assembled QDs solids to achieve inter-defect charge transportation. Such charge flow is expected to have long diffusion length and exempted from the electron/hole imbalance. Finally, we will apply magnetic field in the QD solar cells to polarize the spin orbitals of excited states of QDs cores. This will forbid the auger recombination and therefore enable the doping assistant MEG with large collection efficiency. Our goal is to improve photo-physical properties and finally break the current bottlenecks in QD solar cells.

Original source.

Source: OpenAIRE Graph: projects of national funders, OpenAIRE, from the project data of Swedish Research Council. Retrieved 2026-10-28. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (OpenAIRE Graph). Selected metadata, adapted presentation; the publisher's record is authoritative. No endorsement by the source is implied. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

AI-assisted summary: The project "Doping Colloidal Quantum Dots to Break the Photophysical Bottlenecks in Solar Cell Applications" is funded by the Swedish Research Council with a grant of SEK 4,000,000, running from 2018 to 2021, involving Lund University. Suggested technology pillar: enabling. Generated by AI from the public source text; it may contain errors and the original source is authoritative.