Open Access

ARTICLE

Influence of tellurium on physical properties of ZnIn₂Se₄ thin films solar cell

H. K. Mahmood^*, B. H. Hussein

Department of Physics, College of Education for Pure Science / Ibn Al-Haitham, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq

* Corresponding Author:

Chalcogenide Letters 2024, 21(9), 687-694. https://doi.org/10.15251/CL.2024.219.687

Received 05 June 2024; Accepted 03 September 2024;

Abstract

ZnIn₂(Se_1-xTe_x)₄ (ZIST) chalcopyrite semiconductor thin films at various contents (x = 0.0, 0.2, and 0.4) are deposited on glass and p type silicon (111) substrate to produce heterojunction solar cell by using the thermal evaporation technique at RT where the thickness of 500 nm with a vacuum of 1×10^-5 mbar and a deposited rates of 5.1 nm/s. This study focuses on how differing x content effect on the factors affecting the solar cell characteristics of ZIST thin film and n-ZIST/p-Si heterojunction. X-ray diffraction XRD investigation shows that this structure of ZIST film is polycrystalline and tetragonal, with (112) preferred orientation at 2θ ≈ 27.01. Moreover, atomic force microscopy AFM is studying the external morphology of film, and it is shown that both surface roughness and average diameter increase with increasing x content, hence increasing the crystallite size of thin films. UV/visible spectrophotometer was analyse the optical features of ZIST films, such as absorption coefficient, optical energy, and these films possessed a direct gap that decreased with increase of x content until it reached its lowest value of 1.6 eV at x = 0.4. Hall measurement displayed that the ZIST thin film is n-nature semiconductors with a maximum carrier concentration N_H = 6.2 × 10¹⁸ (1/cm³) , minimum resistivity 0.047 Ω.cm. The illumination current-voltage characteristics revealed that the n-ZIST/p-Si solar cell heterojunction at x = 0.4 content has a maximum efficiency of 2.97%.

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