Group IV Mid-Infrared Thermophotovoltaic Cells on Silicon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Compound semiconductors have been the predominant building blocks for the current mid-infrared thermophotovoltaic devices relevant to sub-2000 K heat conversion and power beaming. However, the prohibitively high cost associated with these technologies limits their broad adoption. Herein, to alleviate this challenge we introduce an all-group IV mid-infrared cell consisting of GeSn alloy directly on a silicon wafer. This emerging class of semiconductors provides strain and composition as degrees of freedom to control the bandgap energy thus covering the entire mid-infrared range. The proposed thermophotovoltaic device is composed of a fully relaxed Ge$_{0.83}$Sn$_{0.17}$ double heterostructure corresponding to a bandgap energy of 0.29 eV. A theoretical framework is derived to evaluate cell performance under high injection. The black-body radiation absorption is investigated using the generalized transfer matrix method thereby considering the mixed coherent/incoherent layer stacking. Moreover, the intrinsic recombination mechanisms and their importance in a narrow bandgap semiconductor were also taken into account. In this regard, the parabolic band approximation and Fermi's golden rule were combined for an accurate estimation of the radiative recombination rate. Based on these analyses, power conversion efficiencies of up to 9% are predicted for Ge$_{0.83}$Sn$_{0.17}$ thermophotovoltaic cells under black-body radiation at temperatures in the 500-1500 K range. A slight improvement in the efficiency is observed under the frontside illumination but vanishes below 800 K, while the use of a backside reflector improves the efficiency across the investigated black-body temperature range. The effects of the heterostructure thickness, surface recombination velocity, and carrier lifetime are also elucidated and discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".