Solar cell efficiency enhancement via light trapping in printable resonant dielectric nanosphere arrays

Resonant dielectric structures are a promising platform for addressing the key challenge of light trapping in thin-film solar cells. We experimentally and theoretically demonstrate efficiency enhancements in solar cells from dielectric nanosphere arrays. Two distinct amorphous silicon photovoltaic architectures were improved using this versatile light-trapping platform. In one structure, the colloidal monolayer couples light into the absorber in the near-field acting as a photonic crystal light-trapping element. In the other, it acts in the far-field as a graded index antireflection coating to further improve a cell which already included a state-of-the-art random light-trapping texture to achieve a conversion efficiency over 11%. For the near-field flat cell architecture, we directly fabricated the colloidal monolayer on the device through Langmuir–Blodgett deposition in a scalable process that does not degrade the active material. In addition, we present a novel transfer printing method, which utilizes chemical crosslinking of an optically thin adhesion layer to tether sphere arrays to the device surface. The minimally invasive processing conditions of this transfer method enable the application to a wide range of solar cells and other optoelectronic devices. False-color SEM image of an amorphous silicon solar cell with resonant spheres on top

Health knowledge among the millennial generation

The Millennial Generation, also known as Generation Y, is the demographic cohort following Generation X, and is generally regarded to be composed of those individuals born between 1980 and 2000. They are the first to grow up in an environment where health-related information is widely available by internet, TV and other electronic media, yet we know very little about the scope of their health knowledge. This study was undertaken to quantify two domains of clinically relevant health knowledge: factual content and ability to solve health related questions (application) in nine clinically related medical areas. Study subjects correctly answered, on average, 75% of health application questions but only 54% of health content questions. Since students were better able to correctly answer questions dealing with applications compared to those on factual content contemporary US high school students may not use traditional hierarchical learning models in acquisition of their health knowledge

Countering catastrophic criminology: reform, punishment, and the modern liberal compromise

This article argues that accounts that envisage rupture in penality tend to overplay the coherence of ‘modern’ punishment and underplay the inconsistency of current developments. It suggests that this problem stems in large part from a failure to appreciate the ‘braided’ nature of modern liberal punishment, which is always about both punishment and reform. Part of the ‘secret’ to this is found in David Garland’s earlier work in which the ‘welfare sanction’ appears as a compromise between modernist scientific expertise and liberal legalism and individualism. Normative regulation coupled with punishment in this bargain. As a result, even during the heyday of the welfare sanction and at rehabilitation’s height, punitive and deterrent penalties remained important. Similarly, there is substantial evidence that increasingly widespread approaches such as restorative justice, therapeutic justice and risk-need models carry a newly revised correctionalism into the present. Rather than conceive recent changes as indicative of a watershed in penal rationality and practice, this article suggests that it is more important to think about the ways in which neo-liberal assaults on the modernist side of this equation have transformed its character