Improved Performance of Thermally Evaporated Sb2Se3 Thin-Film Solar Cells via Substrate-Cooling-Speed Control and Hydrogen-Sulfide Treatment.

Antimony selenide is a promising abundant absorber material for solar cells. However, current Sb2Se3 photovoltaic devices, which are fabricated via thermal evaporation, tend to have stoichiometric problems and show suboptimal performance. In this paper, we use a modified thermal evaporator to fabricate high-quality Sb2Se3 films. By dedicatedly cooling the substrate, we can improve both the Sb2Se3 morphology and the Sb2Se3/CdS heterojunction interface substantially. We find a suitable annealing atmosphere, H2S, which can largely compensate for possible deficiencies of Se and remove the antimony-oxide layer on the film surface. Thanks to cooling control and H2S treatment, we obtain a significantly improved efficiency (6.24%) for the Sb2Se3 solar cells. Our results indicate that this thermal evaporation technique is a promising approach to improve the large-scale fabrication of antimony chalcogenide solar cells.