Earticle

Background: We investigated the current characteristics of a thin-film Ag electrode on a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) diamond. The CVD diamond is widely recognized as a radiation detection material because of its high tolerance against high radiation, stable response to various dose rates, and good sensitivity. Additionally, thin-film Ag has been widely used as an electrode with high electrical conductivity. Materials and Methods: Considering these properties, the thin-film Ag electrode was deposited onto CVD diamonds with varied deposition thicknesses (≒50/98/152/257 nm); subsequently, the surface thickness, surface roughness, leakage current, and photo-current were characterized. Results and Discussion: The leakage current was found to be very low, and the photo-current output signal was observed as stable for a deposited film thickness of 98 nm; at this thickness, a uniform and constant surface roughness of the deposited thin-film Ag electrode were obtained. Conclusion: We found that a CVD diamond radiation detector with a thin-film Ag electrode deposition thickness close to 100 nm exhibited minimal leakage current and yielded a highly stable output signal.

In this study, an n-ZnO/p-Si heterojunction diode with embedded Ag nanoparticles was fabricated to investigate the possible improvement of light trapping via the surface plasmon resonance effect for solar cell applications. The Ag nanoparticles were fabricated by the physical sputtering method. The acquired current-voltage curves and optical absorption spectra demonstrated that the application of Ag nanoparticles in the n-ZnO/p-Si interface increased the photo current, particularly in specific wavelength regions. The results indicate that the enhancement of the photo current was caused by the surface plasmon resonance effect generated by the Ag nanoparticles. In addition, minority carrier lifetime measurements showed that the recombination losses caused by the Ag nanoparticles were negligible. These results suggest that the embedding of Ag nanoparticles is a powerful method to improve the performance of n-ZnO/p-Si heterojunction solar cells.

Recently, many researchers made progress in various studies improving the efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cell. In this paper, we used glass textured by wet-chemical etching process for improvement of photocurrent density in dye-sensitized solar cells. This is owing to increase coefficient of light utilization. Consequently, DSSC using the textured glass exhibit a Jsc of 9.49 mA/$cm^2$, a Voc of 0.73 V and a fill factor (FF) of 0.67 with an overall conversion efficiency of 4.64. This result showed increasing of 20% current density and 16% conversion efficiency using the textured glass. These results suggested that glass texturing was very effective in controlling the light-scattering properties into the photovoltaic cell.