Investigation of confined electron gas in a quantum well structure with photovoltaic application

Abstract

The growth-diection quantization of confined electron gas in a GaAs/AlGaAs based quantum well structure is obtained in the Kohn-Sham iterative computational scheme. The longitudinal conductance at low temperatures, in the presence of magnetic field applied in the same direction, is studied to confirm the presence of the bound-states obtained through this scheme. The sub-band absorption is calculated by a frequently used approximation modeling the absorption as a convolution between spectral functions. The absorption coefficient is used to obtain photovoltaic performance related parameters of a quantum well solar cell. When compared to a device without the quantum wells, it is found that the additional carrier generation in the wells due to extension of absorption edge into longer wavelengths brings about moderate enhancement in the values of these parameters.