Rapid thermal evaporation for cadmium selenide thin-film solar cells

Abstract

Cadmium selenide (CdSe) belongs to the binary II-VI group semiconductor with a direct bandgap of ~1.7 eV. The suitable bandgap, high stability, and low manufacturing cost make CdSe an extraordinary candidate as the top cell material in silicon-based tandem solar cells. However, only a few studies have focused on CdSe thin-film solar cells in the past decades. With the advantages of a high deposition rate (~2 µm/min) and high uniformity, rapid thermal evaporation (RTE) was used to maximize the use efficiency of CdSe source material. A stable and pure hexagonal phase CdSe thin film with a large grain size was achieved. The CdSe film demonstrated a 1.72 eV bandgap, narrow photoluminescence peak, and fast photoresponse. With the optimal device structure and film thickness, we finally achieved a preliminary efficiency of 1.88% for CdSe thin-film solar cells, suggesting the applicability of CdSe thin-film solar cells.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

cadmium selenide (CdSe) / rapid thermal evaporation (RTE) / solar cells / thin film

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61725401, 61904058, and 62050039), the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2016YFA0204000), the Innovation Fund of WNLO, National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talent (No. BX20190127), the Graduates’ Innovation Fund of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (No. 2020yjsCXCY003), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Project (Nos. 2019M662623 and 2020M680101). The authors thank the Analytical and Testing Center of HUST and the facility support of the Center for Nanoscale Characterization and Devices (CNCD), WNLO-HUST.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12200-021-1217-1 and is accessible for authorized users.

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