Crystalline Si has enjoyed spectacular success in the solar cell industry for various reasons including the ability to benefit from technological breakthroughs in the microelectronics industry and the close proximity of the 1.1 eV band gap value of Si to the optimal theoretical 1.3 eV band gap value for which the thermodynamically limited single-cell...

The application of silicon photonic technologies to optical telecommunications requires the development of near-infrared detectors monolithically integrated to the Si platform. Most present approaches require the bonding of the semiconductor detector material to the silicon circuitry, which can be time consuming and expensive. While approaches to...

The ability to manufacture high quality Sn-Ge and Si-Ge-Sn alloys has significant industry value for various reasons; however, existing techniques have failed to produce sufficiently high quality alloys to allow for effective use of these alloys in device applications. Specifically, the ability of Sn-Ge alloys to transition from indirect- to direct-gap...

Nanotechnology is the study of the control of matter at the atomic and molecular level, and is focused mainly on the creation of materials and equipment to work within that scale. One thing holding back the advancement of this technology is the lack of experimental tools capable of visualizing nanoprocesses in real time across their full range of...