ETA stands for Extremely Thin Absorber, and an ETA-cell is an advanced solar cell design where a porous or structured material (2-10 micrometers in thickness) is coated with layer of a light-absorbing inorganic semiconductor. This is different from the Dye Sensitized Solar Cells in that the sensitizer is inorganic.
Note: eta is also the Greek symbol used in photovoltaic terminology to represent "energy conversion efficiency".
The ETA-cells in the literature have two distinct conformations of materials sandwiched between two conductive contacts.
One is a three-component system: a ZnO nanowire matrix, coated by a metal chalcogenide (MC) absorber and a wide band gap p-type material (CuSCN).
The other is a binary matrix of mesoporous TiO2 (anatase) filled with a high purity small band gap p-type material (generates electron-hole pairs and is a majority hole carrier).
Neither one truly fills the requirements of a p-n juction: the ZnO basis is more of a non-traditional p-i-n heterojunction; and the characteristic lengths in the TiO2 basis are too small for band bending, so there should be no space charge layer characteristic of a p-n junction.
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