A ferroelectric-semiconductor-coupled solar cell with tunable photovoltage

In this work, we proposed and febricated a device with a symmetric sandwich structure as: “ITO/ ferroelectric-PV layer/ITO” to study the feasibility of nanodipole photovoltaic devices. The ferroelectric-PV layer is composed of CdS nanodipole particles and CdTe absorber. It is fabricated by extract CdS piezoelectric nanoparticles from CdSTe mixed film due to phase segregation. Some convincing evidences were found to confirm the mechanism of nanodipoles. First, an analogous electric hysteresis of photovoltage was observed in such devices. Second, piezoresponse was observed on grain boundaries, which is believed to contribute; significantly to the hysteresis behavior of photovoltage. Such hysteresis feature of photovoltage can not be explained by classical junctional device theory.