Abstract
Antimony selenide (Sb2Se3) is regarded as one of the key alternative absorber materials for conventional thin film solar cells due to its excellent optical and electrical properties. Here, we proposed a Sb2Se3 thin film solar cell fabricated using a two-step process magnetron sputtering followed by a post-selenization treatment, which enabled us to optimize the best quality of both the Sb2Se3 thin film and the Sb2Se3/CdS heterojunction interface. By tuning the selenization parameters, a Sb2Se3 thin film solar cell with high efficiency of 6.06% was achieved, the highest reported power conversion efficiency of sputtered Sb2Se3 planar heterojunction solar cells. Moreover, our device presented an outstanding open circuit voltage (VOC) of 494 mV which is superior to those reported Sb2Se3 solar cells. State and density of defects showed that proper selenization temperature could effectively passivate deep defects for the films and thus improve the device performance.
Highlights
Thin film solar cells have made remarkable progress over the past few years as the power conversion efficiencies (PCE) of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) and cadmium telluride (CdTe) have reached over 22% [1,2]
The tubular furnace was evacuated to a relatively low background pressure using a mechanical pump before the selenization commenced, after that high purity Ar (> 99.999%) was pumped into the furnace and the working pressure was kept at 5 × 104 Pa during the whole annealing process. 0.25 g of Selenium (Se) powder with high purity (> 99.999%) was kept at 400 °C during the selenization process whilst the temperature on the Sb2Se3 thin film side increased from 340 °C to 460 °C in a step of 40 °C
The samples annealed at different temperatures were denoted as 340-Sb2Se3, 380-Sb2Se3, 420-Sb2Se3 and 460-Sb2Se3
Summary
Thin film solar cells have made remarkable progress over the past few years as the power conversion efficiencies (PCE) of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) and cadmium telluride (CdTe) have reached over 22% [1,2]. The study demonstrated that the one-dimensional Sb2Se3 nanorod arrays do improve the carrier transport, the surface roughness of the absorber as well as the space between nanorods have been significantly increased This generates a potential problem for this structure as there is a risk that the conventional cadmium sulfide (CdS) film would contact the Mo-coated glass substrate, leading to shunt leakage formation and degrading the conversion efficiency of the device [14]. Given that apart from the reported nanorod array structure [14], all the other Sb2Se3 thin film solar cells with high efficiency are based on planar heterojunction configuration. By carefully optimizing the selenization procedure, highly crystallized [211]-oriented Sb2Se3 ribbons and the Mo/Sb2Se3/CdS/ITO/Ag device with PCE of 6.06% were achieved, which is the highest conversion efficiency of sputtered Sb2Se3 planar heterojunction solar cells. We have found that selenization temperature to be the key for the crystallinity, crystal orientation and chemical composition of the Sb2Se3 films as well as the Sb2Se3/CdS planar heterojunction quality, and the conversion efficiency of the final device
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