ZnO and GaN Nanowire‐Based Type II Heterostructures

Summary

This chapter describes a new approach that employs two large bandgap materials with type II (a) band alignment to achieve near‐IR or visible photo‐response threshold that is desired in solar energy applications, such as solar cell and photo‐chemical cell, and other optoelectronic applications. It focuses on the type II (a) heterostructure with large bandgap materials for PV‐related applications; from now on we simply refer to type II (a) as type II. The electronic structures of type II core‐shell NWs were investigated using a density‐functional theory for GaN‐GaP and Zinc oxide (ZnO)‐Zinc selenide (ZnSe) with the bandgap error due to a corrected local density approximation. A brief review has been provided to highlight an all‐inorganic version type II hetero‐junction solar cell i.e. based on large bandgap semiconductors, in particular ZnO‐ZnSe and GaN‐GaP.