Abstract
Rapid recombination by cadmium vacancies in CdTe
Highlights
Cadmium telluride (CdTe) is currently the largest thin-film photovoltaic technology
Its ideal 1.5 eV electronic band gap and high absorption coefficient have allowed it to reach record light-to-electricity conversion efficiencies of 22.1%.2−4 Given that device architectures and large-scale manufacturing procedures have been highly optimized for this technology a result of several decades of intensive research[2,5] further reductions in cost will be heavily dependent on improvements in photoconversion efficiency.[1,2,6]
Under the idealized detailed balance model, CdTe has an upper limit of 32% single-junction PV efficiency,[7] indicating that there is still room for improvement.[6,8−11]
Summary
CdTe is currently the largest thin-film photovoltaic technology. Nonradiative electron−hole recombination reduces the solar conversion efficiency from an ideal value of 32% to a current champion performance of 22%.
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