Daniel Obi

The annual solar energy received by the earth has been estimated to be 100,000 times the world energy consumption. In other words, solar energy represents one of the most abundant energy resources available to man. It is a huge energy resource, renewable, clean, and sustainable. It holds the possibility of addressing climatic issues, environmental concern of fossil fuel energy and long term future energy demand. Unfortunately, it is one of the least harvested.
Though extensive research & development of semiconductor physics and technology have lead to fabrication of different types of solar cells. The inability of these solar cells to compete favourably with fossil fuel energy emanate from high cost of production and low power output. Though, in recent years, tremendous progress has been made in developing Photovoltaic that can possibly address either one or both drawback of solar cells.
The fast development in nanotechnology allows the realization of very small dimension objects which have properties different from those of macroscopic ones. This is particularly the case for silicon nanowires in which quantum confinement affects their properties.
More recently, ferroelectric thin films have emerged as an alternative pathway for photovoltaic devices. Furthermore, the availability of lower band gap multiferroic oxides such as BFO and BFCO, provide alternative materials to achieve a higher photovoltaic efficiency at possibly reduced cost.
The focus of my research work is to study the combination of silicon nanostructures such as nanowire and multiferroic oxides materials and fabricate hybrid solar cells. The first phase is to grow and optimize silicon nanowires with Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE). The second phase is to grow and optimize multiferroic thin films with pulsed laser deposition technique. Thereafter, novel solar cells will be fabricated based on silicon nano wire embedded in multiferroic oxides thin films.