Special Section Guest Editorial: Novel Photovoltaic Device Architectures

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ ar6/wg2/), limiting global temperature increase to 1.5 °C by the end of the 21st century requires a rapid and profound transformation of our energy generation landscape. Solar photovoltaics (PV) is a mature technology ready to contribute to this challenge. Throughout the last decade, a higher capacity of solar PV was installed globally than any other power-generation technology, and cumulative capacity at the end of 2019 accounted for more than 600 GW globally. This is an achievement to be celebrated by the PV industry and confirms the potential of this renewable power-generation technology. However, despite the maturity of the PV industry, innovations are still needed to increase the scale and sustainability of PV and to diversify the application of these systems in various scenarios for example, electrification of transport, building-integrated PV, and high power and compact PV systems for resource-limited applications, such as CubeSATs and space power systems, and for lightweight mobile power applications, such as in camping and mobile fighter scenarios. These PV innovations will be led by exploration of new materials for PV absorbers, advanced although not necessarily more complex device architectures, and novel photon management systems that can effectively utilize high-efficiency concepts. This special section of the SPIE Journal of Photonics for Energy (JPE) on novel PV architectures (https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/jpe-novel-photovoltaic-device-architectures) includes contributions from leading research groups studying next-generation solar cell designs and novel photon management approaches, which hold the promise for next-generation applications and breaking the Shockley Queisser efficiency limit for solar cells.