Simulation Study of Multilayer Si/SiC Quantum Dot Superlattice for Solar Cell Applications

This letter presents a computational study on the band profile of Si/SiC quantum dot (QD) superlattice for solar cell devices and the theoretical conversion efficiency. We find that both the miniband energy of QD superlattice and the conversion efficiency of QD solar cell highly correlate to the space among layers and the number of layers. When the distance between layers is >2 nm, the impact of the number of layers on the tunable ground-state energy bandwidth is weakened. The conversion efficiency increases as the layer distance decreases; however, when the number of layers is greater than 4, the increasing rate of conversion efficiency declines.