Liquid Phase Chemical Deposition of Cobalt Sulphide Thin Films: Growth and Properties

Metal chalcogenide thin films are assuming increasing interest in a variety of optical and optoelectronic devices viz. decorative coatings, solar absorbers, photo-detectors, and solar cells including recent photoelectrochemical solar cells [1-5]. Attempts were made to deposit a variety of metal chalcogenide thin films employing various deposition technologies individually [1,4,5,611] and very recently following a combinatorial approach for the development of new materials and device structures with new and improved properties offering a high degree of flexibility for substrate materials, deposition conditions and preparative parameters, and real time monitoring capability that helps to reduce sample size, time, and cost of the fabrication [12]. This requires development of new and complex deposition systems, the analysis, performance, and therefore development of new thin film materials is rather complex and tedious. Growth of the metal chalcogenide thin films via chemical solution deposition or chemical bath deposition or chemical growth process route has been one of the key technologies today [8-12] because it is the conventional method with the advantages of economy, convenience, easy scaling up to large area (even complex shapes) deposition, high degree of direct composition control and enabled recently oxide, nitride, and carbide films for optronic, hard coatings, and dielectric applications [8-12]. In view of the above advantages of the deposition process and diverse applications of the metal chalcogenide films, we have decided to initiate synthesis of cobalt sulphide thin films owing to , S. T. MANE Thin Film & Solar Studies Research Laboratory, Department of Physics, Solapur University, Solapur, Solapur-Pune Road, Kegaon, Solapur413255, M.S., India.