Hot carrier solar cells have a fundamental efficiency limit well in excess of single junction devices. Developing a hot carrier absorber material, which exhibits sufficiently slow carrier cooling to maintain a hot carrier population under realistic levels of solar concentration is a key challenge in developing real-world hot carrier devices. We propose strain-balanced In0.25GaAs/GaAsP0.33 quantum wells as a suitable absorber material and present continuous-wave photoluminescence spectroscopy of this structure. Samples were optimised with deep wells and the GaAs surface buffer layer was reduced in thickness to maximise photon absorption in the well region. The effect of well thickness on carrier distribution temperature was also investigated. An enhanced hot carrier effect was observed in the optimised structures and a hot carrier distribution temperature was measured in the thick well (14 nm) sample under photon flux density equivalent to 1000 Suns concentration.
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