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The adsorption capacity of soil itself makes it difficult to efficiently remove phenanthrene and pyrene from soil by direct leaching. In this article, hydrochar was introduced into the leaching process after modification, and the enhanced leaching effect of hydrothermal carbon was explored under various influencing factors. The experimental results show that the modified hydrochar competes with the soil for adsorption during the leaching process, promotes the desorption of pollutants and adsorbs some pollutants in the leaching solution, which greatly enhances the leaching effect. The elution of phenanthrene increased from 64.06% to 91.08% and of pyrene from 70.26% to 91.13% under the optimum enhanced drenching conditions. This work provides some new ideas for the removal of PAHs from the natural soil environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturing high‐quality zinc oxide (ZnO) devices demands control of the orientation of ZnO materials due to the spontaneous and piezoelectric polarity perpendicular to the c‐plane. However, flexible electronic and optoelectronic devices are mostly built on polymers or glass substrates which lack suitable epitaxy seeds for the orientation control. Applying cubic‐structure seeds, it was possible to fabricate polar c‐plane and nonpolar m‐plane aluminium‐doped zinc oxide (AZO) films epitaxially on flexible Hastelloy substrates through minimizing the lattice mismatch. The growth is predicted of c‐plane and m‐plane AZO on cubic buffers with lattice parameters of 3.94–4.63 Å and 5.20–5.60 Å, respectively. The ∼80 nm‐thick m‐plane AZO film has a resistivity of ∼11.43 ± 0.01 × 10−4 Ω cm, while the c‐plane AZO film shows a resistivity of ∼2.68 ± 0.02 × 10−4 Ω cm comparable to commercial indium tin oxide films. An abnormally higher carrier concentration in the c‐plane than in the m‐plane AZO film results from the electrical polarity along the c‐axis. The resistivity of the c‐plane AZO film drops to the order of 10−5 Ω cm at 500 K owing to the semiconducting behaviour. Epitaxial AZO films with low resistivities and controllable orientations on flexible substrates offer optimal transparent electrodes and epitaxy seeds for high‐performance flexible ZnO devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low texture spreads of single‐crystalline‐like materials are critical for high performance of low‐cost flexible semiconductors and second‐generation high‐temperature superconductors based on metal foils. For texture improvement, a single‐crystalline‐like Ag film is epitaxially grown on an ion‐beam‐assisted deposition TiN substrate using magnetron sputtering. Ultra‐low texture spreads are found in the thin Ag film (∼330 nm), with an out‐of‐plane texture spread (Δω) of ∼1.03° and an in‐plane texture spread (Δϕ) of ∼1.34°. Compared with the texture spreads of the TiN substrate, Δω and Δϕ of the Ag film are reduced by ∼42 and ∼79%, respectively. Applying this Ag buffer, the texture spreads of a single‐crystalline‐like Ge film are reduced by ∼37% (Δω) and ∼36% (Δϕ). Factors contributing to the texture improvement by Ag are studied using single‐crystalline‐like Ag films with various thicknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates the first flexible single‐junction III‐V photovoltaic solar cells (SCs) based on single‐crystal‐like gallium arsenide (GaAs) thin films on a low‐cost metal substrate by direct and continuous deposition, which can bypass expensive single crystal wafer fabrication. The two‐dimensional modeling of the GaAs SC is developed and used to study feasibility of single‐crystal‐like GaAs thin films for high performance SC devices. A promising SC device performance characteristic with an open‐circuit voltage of 560 mV and short circuit current of 19.4 mA/cm2, resulting in a conversion efficiency of ~7.6%, is demonstrated. We developed flexible thin film III‐V solar cells on a new photovoltaics (PV) platform where nearly single‐crystalline III‐V thin films are directly grown on inexpensive polycrystalline metal substrates using crystallinity‐transformational buffer layers. This PV technology combines the efficiency advantages of high‐quality III‐V materials with continuous roll‐to‐roll deposition process of thin film on a low‐cost tape substrate to produce flexible, cost‐competitive, and high‐efficiency SCs with application versatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cover image is based on the Research Article High‐efficiency flexible III‐V photovoltaic solar cells based on single‐crystal‐like thin films directly grown on metallic tapes by Sara Pouladi et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/pip.3070. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]