Myles Steiner (45Min)

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

Abstract

We have demonstrated six-junction III-V solar cells for operation at high concentration, with a record power conversion efficiency of 47.1% at 143 suns. When re-tuned to the global spectrum, a variant of the cell had an efficiency of 39.2% at one sun. The inverted metamorphic multijunction (IMM) architecture spans the wavelength range of 350-1800 nm, and includes three lattice-matched and three lattice-mismatched junctions. I will describe some of the materials challenges associated with metastable alloys and lattice-mismatched epitaxy, and our efforts to reduce series resistance.

Brief Bio

Myles Steiner is a Senior Scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, Colorado, where he leads research projects on high efficiency III-V solar cells for electricity generation, energy storage and hydrogen production applications. In 13 years at NREL, he has worked on enhanced photon recycling and luminescent coupling in multijunction cells, growth and ordering of lattice-mismatched GaInP and GaInAs solar cells, mechanical stacking and lateral spectrum splitting multijunction designs, and strain-balanced quantum well solar cells. Myles completed his Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 2006, where he studied superconductor-insulator phase transitions in homogenously disordered superconductors. He is currently visiting the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia for three months as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar.