Preface

In the search of, renewable and clean energy, the solar cell is considered a major candidate for obtaining energy from the sun. To capture the energy of entire solar spectrum is the main challenge to improve the performance of photovoltaic devices. Incorporation of nanomaterials as a light harvester made a revolutionary change in the field of solar cell technology to both enhance efficiency and lower total cost. First and foremost advantage of nanomaterials is tunable band offset and visible response with size quantization, which allow us to harvest desired portion of solar spectrum. Till date different kind of nonmaterial have been tested for their light harvesting properties, such as compound semiconductor nanoparticles, quantum dots, metal nanoparticles etc. Understanding their energy transfer mechanism and charge carrier capacity are the important parameters to make it more useful for solar cell.

This book summarized the present scenario and fundamentals of synthetic approaches and tailoring the light harvesting properties of a variety of nanostructured materials and their application in photovoltaic industries with a systematic and coherent picture of the field.

The chapters of this book written by distinguished scientists, who are experts of their fields. We sincerely hope that this book will provide insight into subject and some new directions to material scientists as well as the new researchers.

Surya Prakash Singh
Inorganic and Physical Chemistry Division
CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology
Hyderabad
India
E-mail: spsingh@iict.res.in