Rare-earth-activated glasses for solar energy conversion

The solar cells efficiency may be improved by better exploitation of the solar spectrum, making use of the down-conversion mechanism, where one high energy photon is cut into two low energy photons. The choice of the matrix is a crucial point to obtain an efficient down-conversion process with rare-earth ions. When energy transfer between rare earth ions is used to activate this process, high emission and absorption cross sections as well as low cut-off phonon energy are mandatory. In this paper we present some results concerning 70SiO2-30HfO2 glass ceramic planar waveguides co-activated by Tb3+/Yb3+ ions, fabricated by sol gel route using a top-down approach, and a bulk fluoride glass of molar composition 70ZrF4 23.5LaF3 0.5AlF3 6GaF3 co-activated by Pr3+/Yb3+ ion. Attention is focused on the assessment of the energy transfer efficiency between the two couples of rare earth ions in the different hosts.