All-inorganic visibly-transparent energy-harvesting clear laminated glass windows are the most practical solution to boosting building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) energy outputs significantly while reducing cooling- and heating-related energy consumption in buildings. By incorporating luminophore materials into lamination interlayers and using spectrally-selective thin-film coatings in conj...

We have studied the structural and electronic properties of pure, deffect and doped chalcopyrite semiconductors using Density functional theory (DFT) based first principle technique within Tight binding Linear Muffin Tin orbital (TB-LMTO) method. Our calculated structural parameters such as lattice constant, anion displacement parameter(u) in case of pure chalcopyrite and anion displacement par...

Raman microspectroscopy provides the means to obtain local orientations on polycrystalline materials at the submicrometer level. The present work demonstrates how orientation-distribution maps composed of Raman intensity distributions can be acquired on large areas of several hundreds of square micrometers. A polycrystalline CuInSe2 thin film was used as a model system. The orientation distribu...

Type transformation in CuInSe2 and CuInS2 solar cells is an important issue with far reaching consequences. In the present study, the presence of a p-n homojunction inside CuInS2 in a TiO2/CuInS2 device is revealed with a detailed impedance spectroscopy and capacitance study. A n-type CuInS2 film with a thickness of 40 nm is found at the TiO2 n-type /CuInS2 p-type interface. The effective donor...

Migration-enhanced epitaxy ~MEE! has been successfully employed to grow epitaxial films of the ternary compound CuInSe2 on ~001! GaAs that exhibit distinct coexisting domains of both a nonequilibrium crystallographic structure characterized by CuAu ~CA! cation ordering, and the compound’s equilibrium chalcopyrite structure. X-ray diffraction, transmission electron diffraction, and Raman scatter...

Alkali metal doping and grain boundaries (GB) have been at the center of attention within Cu(In,Ga)(S,Se)2 photovoltaics community for years. This study provides first experimental evidence that GB sodium-doped CuInSe2 thin films may undertake reversible oxidation even room temperature, whereas undoped not. The findings are corroborated by cathodoluminescence imaging, secondary ion mass spectro...