Thermophotovoltaics articles from across Nature Portfolio

Hot carrier solar cells promise efficiencies above the thermodynamic limit but the hot carrier effects remain elusive so far. Here, Nguyen and Lombez et al. quantify the hot carrier contribution to the voltage and current of a micrometre-scale solar cell operating at room temperature, with an efficiency up to ~11%.

In photovoltaics, sub-band gap energy photons can be harvested using up-conversion strategies. Here, the authors show that the thermally enhanced up-converted photoluminescence results in enhanced energy conversion, for an accessible temperature range and with a broad range of incident photon energy.

The ability of photovoltaic devices to harvest solar energy can be enhanced by tailoring the spectrum of incident light with thermophotovoltaic devices. Bierman et al. now show that one such device achieves a solar-to-electrical efficiency of 6.8%, exceeding that of the solar cell alone.