Crystal Growth Promotion and Defects Healing Enable Minimum Open-Circuit Voltage Deficit in Antimony Selenide Solar...

Antimony selenide (Sb₂ Se₃ ) is an ideal photovoltaic candidate profiting from its advantageous material characteristics and superior optoelectronic properties, and has gained considerable development in recent years. However, the further device efficiency breakthrough is largely plagued by severe open-circuit voltage (V_OC ) deficit under the existence of multiple defect states and detrimental recombination loss. In this work, an effective absorber layer growth engineering involved with vapor transport deposition and post-selenization is developed to grow Sb₂ Se₃ thin films. High-quality Sb₂ Se₃ with large compact crystal grains, benign [hk1] growth orientation, stoichiometric chemical composition, and suitable direct bandgap are successfully fulfilled under an optimized post-selenization scenario. Planar Sb₂ Se₃ thin-film solar cells with substrate configuration of Mo/Sb₂ Se₃ /CdS/ITO/Ag are constructed. By contrast, such engineering effort can remarkably mitigate the device V_OC deficit, owing to the healed detrimental defects, the suppressed interface and space-charge region recombination, the prolonged carrier lifetime, and the enhanced charge transport. Accordingly, a minimum V_OC deficit of 0.647 V contributes to a record V_OC of 0.513 V, a champion device with highly interesting efficiency of 7.40% is also comparable to those state-of-the-art Sb₂ Se₃ solar cells, paving a bright avenue to broaden its scope of photovoltaic applications.