Toward High Performance Epitaxial and Low-temperature Cu ( In , Ga ) Se 2 Solar Cells
The CIGS research effort at the University of Illinois represents a three-pronged approach to understanding and solving some of the most critical issues in CIGS device. These three prongs are: (1) development of a basic understanding of the issues limiting performance in CIGS devices, (2) advancing the performance of the devices through single crystal epitaxial layers for integration into high-performance cells, and (3) developing novel growth processes that will allow lower deposition temperatures necessary to multijunction devices. This paper presents an approach for CIGS/GaAs and CIGS/Ge heterojunction solar cells for multijunction high-efficiency devices. In addition, application of ionized physical vapor deposition to lowtemperature deposition of CIGS is described. The two projects will be coupled and results from one used to enhance progress in the other as part of the Beyond the Horizon and High Performance PV programs now starting.
DOE/NREL fundamental and exploratory research into solar cells
The U.S. Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory supports fundamental and exploratory research into solar cells. The purpose of the following set of research projects is twofold: (1) to provide fundamental experimental and theoretical foundations to existing photovoltaic (PV)/solar cell technologies, and (2) to explore whole new possibilities in PV/solar cell technologies, however revolutionary or nonconventional they might be. As surely as a number of revolutionary new solar cell technologies will most likely involve high-risk, long-term R&D to bring them to fruition, and may also well be needed as a complement to a future energy portfolio, so we also need timely results. As such, one of the primary driving motives for this effort is the possibility of developing one or more "leapfrog" technologies. These are technologies that have the distinct possibility of "leaping ahead" of existing technologies rather than taking the more characteristic development time of 10 to 20 years.
Law in a law-governed union (Recht in einer Rechtsunion) : the Court of Justice of the European Union and the free law doctrine
The Court of Justice of the European Union characterizes the Union as a Rechtsunion: a law-governed union. The conception of “the law” in Article 19 paragraph 1 of the Treaty on European Union transcends the Treaties, according to the Vice-President of the Court of Justice, Koen Lenaerts. This thesis demonstrates with reference to the work of Georg Jellinek that the Union is a non-sovereign state and, with reference to the work of Eugen Ehrlich in particular, that the state-based perception of law is a misperception. Not all production of law is reserved to the state and not all law is state-recognized law. There is extra-state law. It has been alleged that the Court of Justice of the European Union has had “a free law attitude”. The author discusses the free law doctrine developed at the beginning of the twentieth century and has made literal translations of writings in German, French and Italian by the main representatives of the free law movement. The free law doctrine provides a descriptive framework for the case-law of courts. The author describes the creation by the Court of Justice of four constitutional principles of Union law through its case-law. He concludes that every court is, to quote Hermann Kantorowicz, praeter legem law-creatively active and has, in that sense, a free law attitude. The decisions of judges are often volitional decisions. How the law will be applied should be predictable but volitional decisions, because they are unpredictable, are inconsistent with the principle of legal certainty. In the Union and its member states the judiciary and not the statute or “the law” is pre-eminent. The author suggests how the concept of law should be defined in a material Rechtsunion. He argues that societal legal norms could be provided with an appropriate position consistent with the principle of legal certainty by making the validity of a societal legal norm contingent on its material lawfulness.