CuInSe2 semiconductor formation by laser annealing
Auteurs
H. J. Meadows, D. Regesch, M. Thevenin, J. Sendler, T. Schuler, S. Misra, B. J. Simonds, M. A. Scarpulla, V. Gerliz, L. Gütay, J. Guillot, and P. J. Dale
Référence
Thin Solid Films, vol. 582, pp. 23-26, 2015
Description
One industrially relevant fabrication method for CuInSe2 absorber layers begins with electrodeposition, which is highly resource efficient and easily up-scalable, followed by a high temperature annealing step. Commonly a furnace is used for annealing, although it is possible to reduce the duration of this step by 2–3 orders of magnitude using laser heating. Past work demonstrated that rastering a 1064 nm, continuous wave, neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet laser beam over an electrodeposited precursor film with 1 s dwell time, promoted CuInSe2 formation, grain growth, and gave a photovoltaic device with 1.6% power conversion efficiency. However, this device showed inhomogeneous current collection correlating approximately to the Gaussian flux profile of the laser beam. This work demonstrates how deviations in the incident laser flux on the precursor lead to local temperature variation in the film. The temperature affects the rates of atomic diffusion, grain growth and chemical reactions, with the hottest region having the largest crystallites and a stoichiometric and constant composition through the film depth. Spatially resolved photoluminescence yield shows a positive correlation to the temperature profile caused by the Gaussian flux. It is expected that with a homogeneous laser beam flux, spatial variations in absorber layer properties would be eliminated, leading to uniform device properties.
