Optical signatures of charge- and energy transfer in TMDC/TMDC and TMDC/perovskite heterostructures

Heterostructures (HSs) based on two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) are highly intriguing materials because of the layers’ pronounced excitonic properties and their nontrivial contributions to the HS. These HSs exhibit unique properties that are not observed in either of the constituent components in isolation. Interlayer...

Metal sulfides for gas sensing applications: devices and mechanisms

Nanostructured materials have attracted more and more attention in the applications of gas sensing due to their high specific surface area, numerous surface-active sites, as well as the effect of crystal facets with high surface reactivity. These kinds of gas sensors are mainly used for detecting air quality, environment situation, and breath...

Toward BaSi₂/Si Heterojunction Thin-Film Solar Cells: Insights into Heterointerface Investigation, Barium Depletion, and Silicide-Mediated Silicon Crystallization

The knowledge of the structural and compositional details of Si/BaSi₂/Si heterostructure annealed at high temperature is a prerequisite for BaSi₂ application in heterojunction thin-film solar cells. For this purpose, Si/BaSi₂/Si heterostructures deposited by magnetron sputtering with different Si layer...

Mesoscopic transport in 2D materials and heterostructures

This thesis presents an experimental work on electronic transport in two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals systems. The variety of the physics of the chapters reflects the exploratory character of the Ph.D. study and demonstrates the versatility and the unique properties of some of the members of the vast group of van der Waals materials. In the...

Designing a hybrid thin-film/wafer silicon triple photovoltaic junction for solar water splitting

Solar fuels are a promising way to store solar energy seasonally. This paper proposes an earth-abundant heterostructure to split water using a photovoltaic-electrochemical device (PV-EC). The heterostructure is based on a hybrid architecture of a thin-film (TF) silicon tandem on top of a c-Si wafer (W) heterojunction solar cell (a-Si:H (TF)...

Non-equilibrium electron transport in mesoscale superconducting hybrids

This thesis focusses on driven superconducting heterostructures. Both experimentally and theoretically we address the following questions: (a) how does the presence of different metallic and dielectric materials influence the electronic properties of a driven superconductor? (b) how does a non-equilibrium electron distribution arise and how does...