Open Access

ARTICLE

Attempting Doping Activation via Rapid Thermal Annealing in As-Doped Polycrystalline CdSeTe Solar Cells

Yuzhe Gu¹, Wenwu Wang^1,2, Guanggen Zeng^1,2, Xia Hao^2,3, Lili Wu^1,2, Jingquan Zhang^1,2,*

1 College of Materials Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
2 Engineering Research Center of Alternative Energy Materials & Devices, Ministry of Education, Chengdu, China
3 Institute of New Energy and Low-carbon Technology, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

* Corresponding Author: Jingquan Zhang. Email:

Chalcogenide Letters 2026, 23(3), 4 https://doi.org/10.32604/cl.2026.079159

Received 15 January 2026; Accepted 02 March 2026; Issue published 03 April 2026

Abstract

Doping the absorber layer is a critical process for enhancing the performance of polycrystalline CdSeTe solar cells. Replacing traditional Cu doping with Group V dopants offers a pathway to fabricate devices with improved efficiency and stability. However, the dopant activation rate in polycrystalline structures remains low, typically only a few percent. While rapid thermal annealing (RTA) has been successfully employed to achieve high activation rates in single-crystal CdTe devices, its application to polycrystalline CdSeTe solar cells has been scarcely reported. In this study, we systematically applied multi-step annealing to investigate the dopant activation of in-situ As-doped polycrystalline CdSeTe devices. Our findings reveal that polycrystalline devices exhibit significantly lower thermal tolerance than their single-crystal counterparts, sustaining only short-duration annealing at 500°C. Furthermore, although Cl diffusion during RTA can degrade device performance, we observed that trace amounts of CdCl₂ vapor can help stabilize device efficiency.

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