Colloquium-Nanostructured Bandgap Engineering for Photovoltaic Energy Conversion

State of the art photovoltaic (PV) devices have repeatedly shown the ability to reach and breach the 40% efficiency mark. Such high efficiency cells have been largely bound to the III–V multijunction category. Although efficiency improvements are steady, there may be a saturation point associated with current triple- and quad-junction technologies due to lack of available bandgaps. In order to mitigate these restrictions, the use of quantum confinement has been shown to be effective for bandgap engineering to approach otherwise unavailable bandgaps.  In this work, results will be shown of both epitaxy-based quantum dot and quantum well modified single junction photovoltaic devices in an attempt to investigate their potential to include them in next-generation multijunction PV architectures.