Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) are promising materials for thin film photovoltaic applications. This work studies the epitaxial growth of CIGS single crystal films on GaAs substrates of various orientations and characterizes the properties of the thin films. A surprising finding is the strong tendency of film surfaces to facet to {112} planes. The work attempted to establish the connections between the fi...

A number of approaches have been developed to synthesize the CuInSe2 and CuInGaSe2 based thin film solar cells [1-6]. Due to large numbers of parameters involve in processing a solar cell such as the energy band gap of the back surface field, thickness of the emitter, interface density etc. It is a difficult task to scrutinize and control the effect of each variable on the performance of the so...

We have measured the current-voltage curves of thin-film solar cells using focused laser spots (30 500 μm) using DC and modulated (AC) photocurrent techniques. The AC short-circuit current response (ISC ) and the AC fill factors (FF) decrease for small spot sizes corresponding to several 100 sun light intensities. Laser line scans across the devices produced significant but reproducible spatial...

Heechang Ye,† Hyun S. Park,† Vahid A. Akhavan,‡ Brian W. Goodfellow,‡ Matthew G. Panthani,‡ Brian A. Korgel,‡ and Allen J. Bard*,† Center for Electrochemistry, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The UniVersity of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, United States, Department of Chemical Engineering, Texas Materials Institute, and Center for Nanoand Molecular Science and Technology, The ...

Thin films of copper indium diselenide (CIS) were prepared by chemical bath deposition technique onto glass substrate at 60C. The studies on composition, morphology, optical absorption, electrical conductivity and structure of the films were carried out. Characterization includes X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Atomic force microscopy (AFM), Energy dispersive x-ray ...

In this study, copper indium selenide (CIS) films were synthesized from electrodeposited Cu-In-Se precursors by two-step annealing. The agglomeration phenomenon of the electrodeposited In layer usually occurred on the Cu surface. A thermal process was adopted to turn Cu-In precursors into uniform Cu11In9 binary compounds. After deposition of the Se layer, annealing was employed to form chalcopy...

Historically, molybdenum thin films have been used as the back contact for Cu(In,Ga)Se2 based solar cells and as such the properties of these layers play an important role in the overall cell structure. This paper describes the production of molybdenum films using pulsed d.c magnetron sputtering from compressed molybdenum powder targets. The films were deposited at different substrate temperatu...

The dynamics of innovation are nonlinear and complex: geographical, technological, and economic selection environments can be expected to interact. Can patents provide an analytical lens to this process in terms of different attributes such as inventor addresses, classification codes, backward and forward citations, etc.? Two recently developed patent maps with interactive overlay techniques—Go...

The laboratory performance of CIGS (Cu(In,Ga)Se2) based solar cells (20.8% efficiency) makes them promising candidate photovoltaic devices. However, there remains little understanding of how defects at the CIGS/CdS interface affect the band offsets and interfacial energies, and hence the performance of manufactured devices. To determine these relationships, we use density functional theory with...