TY - JOUR
T1 - Bacteriorhodopsin Enhances Efficiency of Perovskite Solar Cells
AU - Das, Subhabrata
AU - Wu, Congcong
AU - Song, Zhaoning
AU - Hou, Yuchen
AU - Koch, Rainer
AU - Somasundaran, Ponisseril
AU - Priya, Shashank
AU - Barbiellini, Bernardo
AU - Venkatesan, Renugopalakrishnan
N1 - Funding Information:
C.W., Y.H., and S.P. acknowledge the support from Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) through grant number FA9550-18-1-0233 (Biophysics and Natural Materials). B.B. benefitted from support of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences contract no. DEFG02- 07ER46352, and wishes to acknowledge CSC-IT Center for Science, Finland, for computational resources. We thank Kai Zhu and William Tumas from NREL for taking part in the fruitful discussions in the proposal of Perovskite architecture. VR thanks Wallace Coulter Foundation, Rothschild Foundation for support, Prof. Esteve Padros, Universitaria Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain, Professor Norbert Hampp from Philipps- Universitat Marburg, Germany, and late Prof. Har Gobind Khorana, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, for help with the Cys bR mutant. Biosolar project was initiated in the laboratory of Professor Seeram Ramakrishna, National University of Singapore during VR's stay as a visiting faculty in 2006.
Funding Information:
C.W., Y.H., and S.P. acknowledge the support from Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) through grant number FA9550-18-1-0233 (Biophysics and Natural Materials). B.B. benefitted from support of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences contract no. DE-FG02-07ER46352, and wishes to acknowledge CSC-IT Center for Science, Finland, for computational resources. We thank Kai Zhu and William Tumas from NREL for taking part in the fruitful discussions in the proposal of Perovskite architecture. VR thanks Wallace Coulter Foundation, Rothschild Foundation for support, Prof. Esteve Padros, Universitaria Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain, Professor Norbert Hampp from Philipps-Universitat Marburg, Germany, and late Prof. Har Gobind Khorana, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, for help with the Cys bR mutant. Biosolar project was initiated in the laboratory of Professor Seeram Ramakrishna, National University of Singapore during VR’s stay as a visiting faculty in 2006.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Chemical Society.
PY - 2019/8/28
Y1 - 2019/8/28
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1021/acsami.9b06372
DO - 10.1021/acsami.9b06372
M3 - Article
C2 - 31335110
AN - SCOPUS:85071686477
SN - 1944-8244
VL - 11
SP - 30728
EP - 30734
JO - ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
JF - ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
IS - 34
ER -
