“Quantum Coaxial Cables” for Solar Energy Harvesting

Type II core-shell nanowires based on III-V and II-VI semiconductors are designed to provide the highly desirable but not readily available feature--efficient charge separation--and concurrently address the different material challenges specific for a few key renewable energy applications: including hydrogen generation via photoelectrochemical water splitting, dye-sensitized solar cells, and conventional solar cells. They also open up new avenues for studying novel physics and material sciences in reduced dimensionality of very unusual quasi-one-dimensional systems. A first-principles density function theory within the local density approximation (LDA) is used for the electronic structure calculation and a valence-force-field method for the structural relaxation, and empirical corrections to the LDA errors are applied.