Mao Xiaoli, a young teacher from School of Electronic Science and Applied Physics, published a paper — High Efficiency Dye-sensitized Solar Cells Constructed with Composites of TiO2 and the Hot-bubbling Synthesized Ultra-Small SnO2 Nanocrystals on Scientific Reports, an open access journal under Nature.

The author synthesized the 3.4 nm-sized SnO2 nanocrystals (NCs) of high crystallinity via the hot-bubbling method. This work highlights great contributions of the SnO2 NCs to the improvement of the photovoltaic performances in the DSSCs. On the one hand, the conduction band minimum (CBM) of the SnO2 NCs was uplifted due to the quantum size effects, and this was found to alleviate the decrement in the open-circuit voltage. The highly crystalline SnO2 nano-particles synthesized decrease surface state, diminish the composite of electronic charge, thus enhancing the short-circuit current density.

On the other hand, the dye molecule absorption is increased, and the charge transfer and collection of electrons are improved. Therefore, the photovoltaic performances in the DSSCs are greatly improved, which is 1.52 times that of pure TiO2 based photo-anode. The finding is vital to the commercialization of dye-sensitized solar cells.

Mao Xiaoli is also a PhD student supervised by Professor Xu Jinzhang from School of Electronic Science and Applied Physics. She joined Professor Xu’s research team in Institute of New Energy and Environmental Protection. This is the second time for the team to publish a paper on Scientific Reports.

Writer: Liu Jichun

Editor: Wang Jian