ZnO photoluminescent quantum dots with down-shifting effect applied in solar cells (original) (raw)

We report the synthesis of Zinc Oxide (ZnO) quantum dots (QDs) and their influence on the power conversion efficiency of photovoltaic devices. With an excitation wavelength of 340 nm the down-shifted emission peaks were observed to be located at 510 and 540 nm for colloidal solutions with pH values of 10 and 12, respectively. The largest PCE variation was observed to increase from 14.60% to 15.49% when dispersing the QDs extracted from a 4 mL colloidal solution that were subsequently dispersed in PMMA. This represents an improvement of ~6.1%.