Li-doping and Ag-alloying interplay shows the pathway for kesterite solar cells with efficiency over 14%

Kesterite photovoltaic technologies are critical for the deployment of light-harvesting devices in buildings and products, enabling energy sustainable buildings, and households. The recent improvements in kesterite power conversion efficiencies have focused on improving solution-based precursors by...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Gong, Yuancai|||0000-0003-3548-9064, Jiménez Arguijo, Alex|||0000-0002-3583-0958, Gon Medaille, Axel|||0000-0002-8628-0781, Moser, Simon, Basak, Arindam, Scaffidi, Romain, Carron, Romain, Flandre, Denis, Vermang, Bart, Giraldo Muñoz, Sergio|||0000-0003-4881-5041, Xin, Hao, Pérez Rodríguez, Alejandro, Saucedo Silva, Edgardo Ademar|||0000-0003-2123-6162
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/417410
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/417410
https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adfm.202404669
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Solar Cells
Photovoltaic technologies
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Energies::Energia solar fotovoltaica::Cèl·lules solars
Descripción
Sumario:Kesterite photovoltaic technologies are critical for the deployment of light-harvesting devices in buildings and products, enabling energy sustainable buildings, and households. The recent improvements in kesterite power conversion efficiencies have focused on improving solution-based precursors by improving the material phase purity, grain quality, and grain boundaries with many extrinsic doping and alloying agents (Ag, Cd, Ge…). The reported progress for solution-based precursors has been achieved due to a grain growth in more electronically intrinsic conditions. However, the kesterite device performance is dependent on the majority carrier density and sub-optimal carrier concentrations of 1014–1015 cm-3 have been consistently reported. Increasing the majority carrier density by one order of magnitude would increase the efficiency ceiling of kesterite solar cells, making the 20% target much more realistic. In this work, LiClO4 is introduced as a highly soluble and highly thermally stable Li precursor salt which leads to optimal (>1016 cm-3) carrier concentration without a significant impact in other relevant optoelectronic properties. The findings presented in this work demonstrate that the interplay between Li-doping and Ag-alloying enables a reproducible and statistically significant improvement in the device performance leading to efficiencies up to 14.1%.