Bacteriorhodopsin Enhances Efficiency of Perovskite Solar Cells.
Subhabrata DasCongcong WuZhaoning SongYuchen HouRainer KochPonisseril SomasundaranShashank PriyaBernardo BarbielliniRenugopalakrishnan VenkatesanPublished in: ACS applied materials & interfaces (2019)
Recently, halide perovskites have upstaged decades of solar cell development by reaching power conversion efficiencies that surpass the performance of polycrystalline silicon. The efficiency improvement in the perovskite cells is related to repeated recycling between photons and electron-hole pairs, reduced recombination losses, and increased carrier lifetimes. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach toward augmenting the perovskite solar cell efficiency by invoking the Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) mechanism. FRET occurs in the near-field region as the bacteriorhodopsin (bR) protein, and perovskite has similar optical gaps. Titanium dioxide functionalized with the bR protein is shown to accelerate the electron injection from excitons produced in the perovskite layer. FRET predicts the strength of long-range excitonic transport between the perovskite and bR layers. Solar cells incorporating TiO2/bR layers are found to exhibit much higher photovoltaic performance as compared to baseline cells without bR. These results open the opportunity to develop a new class of bioperovskite solar cells with improved performance and stability.
Keyphrases
- solar cells
- energy transfer
- quantum dots
- induced apoptosis
- cell cycle arrest
- single cell
- perovskite solar cells
- cell therapy
- endoplasmic reticulum stress
- protein protein
- dna damage
- single molecule
- stem cells
- signaling pathway
- amino acid
- binding protein
- high resolution
- cell proliferation
- pi k akt
- cell death
- small molecule
- mesenchymal stem cells
- dna repair
- bone marrow
- molecularly imprinted
- ionic liquid