Theoretical investigation of plasmon enhanced optically-coupled hot carrier extraction

Utilizing the energy of hot carriers and reducing their thermalization loss is an important method to improve photovoltaic conversion efficiencies. Optically-coupled extraction is a novel concept to transfer the energy of hot carriers into a conventional PV cell. In this paper, a plasmon core-shell nanowire structure is proposed to realize an optically-coupled hot carrier extraction. The localized surface plasmon resonance supported by the structure significantly increases the local field intensity and also the optical density of states, which allows the effective hot carrier extraction and energy transfer optically.