Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript is clearly within the scope of the journal and well written in the sense that the level of English is good. I recommend it for publication it as it is.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their supportive comments. No further action was taken.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors missed or neglected the important work done by many others in the area of photovoltaics. For example, I did not see (may have missed) authors cited many important ground breaking work of Gratzel, Hagfeldt, Atwater, Durrant, Klimanov and Sargent to name a few. I encourage authors to give the credit where it is due.

Author Response

Dear Editor,

We thank the Referee for the suggestions and added the new references [14,33,58] in the context of lifetime gain, bandgap engineering, and dye-sensitized solar cells, respectively. Additionally, we added the review [59] to better represent the latter subfield. H. A. Atwater had already been cited in our previous submission discussing light management [34] and nanoimprint techniques [37].  

Due to the active research on photovoltaics across diverse areas and on different scales, a short article or opinion cannot be exhaustive. Instead, we aim to give an overview on different aspects of photovoltaics and often indicated reviews for further reading. We underlined this in the final paragraph stating that we "highlight some advances in photovoltaic technologies".

Yours sincerely,

Christin David and Robert Hussein

Reviewer 3 Report

In this opinion, "Advances in Photovoltaic Technologies from Atomic to Device Scale," Christin David and Robert Hussein presented a classical overview of the current advancement in photovoltaic research with a specific emphasis on sustainable development. The opinion summarizes the necessity of improvement in photovoltaic research and the experimental and theoretical approach to enhance and overcome the Shockley and Queisser limit. The opinion also provides nanoparticle and perovskite research on photovoltaics. 

In their guest edition, there are already four articles related to (i) Indium phosphide nanodisk array coatings for thin-filmsilicon-based solar cells, (ii) titanium dioxide nanoresonator arrays for solar cells, (iii) preparing high-quality perovskite photoelectric devices by incorporating cesium lead iodide quantum dots and (iv) identifying parameters of photovoltaic devices from measured current-voltage characteristics by mapping them to an effective model, have been published. All the articles are important and closely related to this guest edition. 

Overall the opinion is well-written, presented, argumented, and supported by relevant references. This will be interested to the readers of photonics journal. The opinion is ready to be published in its current form. I congratulate both Christin David and Robert Hussein for providing good work and their special editon. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their highly encouraging assessment of our opinion and the collection of articles in the related special issue. No further action was taken.