This paper summarizes several studies analyzing consumer incentives for the grid-tied domestic photovoltaic (PV) market.

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We have studied deep impurity levels of CdTe/CdS solar cells by capacitance-voltage (C-V), deep-level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) and time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL).

Co/Pt multilayer films with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and large out-of-plane coercivities of 3.9 - 8.5 kOe have been found to undergo a spin reorientation transition from out-of-plane to in-plane upon irradiation with 700 keV nitrogen ions. X-ray reflectivity experiments show that the multilayer structure gets progressively disrupted with increasing ion dose, providing direct evidence for local atomic displacements at the Co/Pt interfaces. This effectively destroys the magnetic interface anisotropy, which was varied by about a factor of two, between KS@ 0.4 erg/cm2 and KS@ 0.85 erg/cm2 for two particular films. The dose required to initiate spin-reorientation, 6x1014 N+/cm2 and 1.5x1015 N+/cm2, respectively, scales with KS. It is roughly equal to the number of Co interface atoms per unit interface area contributing to KS.

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The results of a detailed EXAFS study of the Cu-K, In-K, and Se-K edges CuIn3Se5 are reported. The Cu and In first nearest neighbor local structures were found to be almost identical to those in CuInSe2.

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Mirror heating in a high power FEL can alter the optical mode and affect the gain of the laser. This can lead to a large reduction of the laser power from ideal values. Measurements of the power and mode size in the Jefferson Lab IR Demo laser have shown clear evidence of mirror distortion at high average power leading (up to 17 kW incident on the mirrors and over 40 W absorbed per mirror). The measurements and comparisons with modeling will be presented. Both steady state and transient analyses and measurements are considered.

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The Albany Research Center (ARC) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been conducting research to investigate the feasibility of mineral carbonation as a method for carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration. The research is part of a Mineral Carbonation Study Program within the Office of Fossil Energy in DOE. Other participants in this Program include DOE?s Los Alamos National Laboratory and National Energy Technology Laboratory, Arizona State University, and Science Applications International Corporation. The research has focused on ex-situ mineral carbonation in an aqueous system. The process developed at ARC reacts a slurry of magnesium silicate mineral with supercritical CO2 to produce a solid magnesium carbonate product. To date, olivine and serpentine have been used as the mineral reactant, but other magnesium silicates could be used as well. The process is designed to simulate the natural serpentinization reaction of ultramafic minerals, and consequently, these results may also be applicable to strategies for in-situ geological sequestration. Baseline tests were begun in distilled water on ground products of foundry-grade olivine. Tests conducted at 150 C and subcritical CO2 pressures (50 atm) resulted in very slow conversion to carbonate. Increasing the partial pressure of CO2 to supercritical (>73 atm) conditions, coupled with agitation …

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We describe a technique of photoluminescence measurements with a resolutiion of microns. This technique is applied to examine the CdS/CdTe interface of CdTe solar cells.

We define what we mean by a 30-year module life and the testing protocol that we believe is involved in achieving such a prediction. However, we do not believe that a universal test (or series of tests) will allow for such a prediction to be made.

The Eolus ASCI project includes parallel, 3-D transport simulation for various nuclear applications. The codes developed within this project provide neutral and charged particle transport, detailed interaction physics, numerous source and tally capabilities, and general geometry packages. One such code is MCNPW which is a general purpose, 3-dimensional, time-dependent, continuous-energy Monte Carlo fully-coupled N-Particle transport code. Significant advances are also being made in the areas of modern software engineering and parallel computing. These advances are described in detail.

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The authors report on design considerations for a new inner vertex detector for the STAR experiment at RHIC. A brief description of the STAR experiment and motivation for a high resolution vertex detector are presented.

Giant bandgap reduction of dilute GaAs1-xNx with nitrogen incorporation makes this material to be very attractive for conversion efficiency increase in multijunction, high efficiency solar cells.

Using NMR, the concentrations of molecular hydrogen have been measured directly in hydrogenated amorphous silicon made by the hot wire chemical vapor deposition (HWCVD) technique.

An analytical model describing electron transport in dye-sensitized nanocrystalline TiO(2) solar cells is shown to account for the non-linear dependence of the electron transport rate on the electron concentration. Equations relating the influenece of an exponential distribtuion of surface states to electron transport are derived and verified by intensity-modulated photocurrent spectroscopy measurements. A slope of 69 meV is inferred for the surface-state distribution curve.

Angular dependence of x-ray fluorescence technique has been applied to the study of atomic density profile in composite systems. This method is shown to be useful for probing the microstructures and intermixing of constituent elements in layer-structured photovoltaic materials.

There are several production disadvantages inherent in the conventional SnO(2)/CdS/CdTe manufacturing processes. In this paper, we report a novel manufacturing process for fabrication of polycrystalline Cd(2)SnO(4)/Zn(2)/SnO(4)/CdS/CdTe thin-film solar cells that yielded a CdS/CdTe device with an NREL-confirmed efficiency of 14.0%.

Status results are presented for the Outdoor Accelerated-Weathering Tracking System (OATS) first study on photovoltaic (PV) modules. Studies began in November 1997 on pairs of commercially available crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon (a-Si) PV modules kept at constant resistive load.