Silicon Nanocrystals for Superefficient Solar Cells

I think that, frankly, you failed to understand the article. This tech uses silicon NANOcrystals. Thin films are only valuable because they use less of the  expensive pure silicon crystals grown to large sizes and thicknesses under exacting conditions.

Nanocrystals are even smaller than thin film, which amounts to slicing the expensive crystals very thin so as to use less of an expensive ingredient and thus keep cost of manufacture lower than otherwise.

Nanocrystals are in fact so much smaller as to make comparisons a joke, really. Large, pure crystals are not the raw material for nanocrystals. And the nanocrystals cannot be amorphous... because they are crystals.

Now on the upside, this tech not only gains from the advantages of efficiency inherent in producing different numbers of electrons based on the amount of energy in the striking photon, but since it doesn't start out as a pure crystal -thick disk or thin film- a manufacturer does not incur the expense of paying for the expensive pure-silicon-crystal-growth processes.

So, the "synergy" with these other techs is effectively already in this one: high efficiency from nano, low costs from avoiding using large amounts of large, pure crystals. And yet it is not synergy at all, nor is it something that we must research to apply. Nanocrystals are not merely thin, they are ridiculously small. "Nano" by definition generally refers to things that are no more than a tenth of a millionth of a meter (100 nanometers or 100nm) in at least 2 spacial dimensions. (Although some "nano" work is in the field of nanofilms that meet this requirement in only 1 dimension, thickness, and are designed to be spread over surfaces for much larger distances than 100nm, often even macroscopic distances.) For these crystals they meet the 100nm criterion in all 3 spacial dimensions. As well, it is impossible for a nanocrystal to be amorphous, in the sense of non-crystalline. If it's a nanocrystal, it's a crystal...just a small one.

Hope that helps.