Surface and Interface Properties in Thin-Film Solar Cells: Using Soft X-rays and Electrons to Unravel the Electronic...

Thin-film solar cells have great potential to overtake the currently dominant silicon-based solar cell technologies in a strongly growing market. Such thin-film devices consist of a multilayer structure, for which charge-carrier transport across interfaces plays a crucial role in minimizing the associated recombination losses and achieving high solar conversion efficiencies. Further development can strongly profit from a high-level characterization that gives a local, electronic, and chemical picture of the interface properties, which allows for an insight-driven optimization. Herein, the authors' recent progress of applying a "toolbox" of high-level laboratory- and synchrotron-based electron and soft X-ray spectroscopies to characterize the chemical and electronic properties of such applied interfaces is provided. With this toolbox in hand, the activities are paired with those of experts in thin-film solar cell preparation at the cutting edge of current developments to obtain a deeper understanding of the recent improvements in the field, e.g., by studying the influence of so-called "post-deposition treatments", as well as characterizing the properties of interfaces with alternative buffer layer materials that give superior efficiencies on large, module-sized areas.