Antimony chalcogenide-based thin film solar cells: Device engineering routes to boost the performance

Abstract

The use of stibnite (Sb2S3) as a light-harvesting material in thin film solar cells has received considerable research interest during the transition of the millennium. However, the use of perovskite diminished the research in the field, and the potential of antimony Chalcogenides [Sb2(S,Se)3] was not explored thoroughly. Although these materials also provide bandgap tuning like perovskite, by varying the composition of S and Se, it is not as popular as perovskite for the fabrication of solar cells mainly because of the low efficiency of the solar cells based on it. In this paper, we present a landscape of the functional role of various device parameters on the performance of Sb2(S,Se)3-based solar cells. For this purpose, we first calibrate the optoelectronic model used for simulation with the experimental results from the literature. The model is then subjected to parametric variations to explore the performance metrics for this class of solar cells. Our results show that despite the belief that the open circuit voltage is independent of contact layers’ doping in proper band-aligned carrier selective thin film solar cells, here we observe otherwise and the open circuit voltage is indeed dependent on the doping density of the contact layers. Using the detailed numerical simulation and analytical model, we further identify the performance optimization route for Sb2(S,Se)3-based thin film solar cells.