Photonic Crystal-Driven Spectral Concentration for Upconversion Photovoltaics

The main challenge for applying upconversion (UC) to silicon photovoltaics is the limited amount of solar energy harvested directly via erbium-based upconverter materials (24.5 W m –2 ). This could be increased up to 87.7 W m –2 via spectral concentration. Due to the nonlinear behavior of UC, this could increase the best UC emission by a factor 13. In this paper, the combined use of quantu…