Impact of RbF and NaF postdeposition treatments on charge carrier transport and recombination in Ga-graded Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells

Two key strategies for enhancing the efficiency of Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells are the bandgap gradient across the absorber and the incorporation of alkali atoms. The combined incorporation of Na and Rb into the absorber has brought large efficiency gains compared to Na-containing or alkali-free layers. Here, transient absorption spectroscopy is employed to study the effect of NaF or combined NaF+RbF postdeposition treatments (PDT) on minority carrier dynamics in different excitation volumes of typical composition-graded Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells. Electron lifetimes are found to be highly dependent on the film composition and morphology, varying from tens of nanoseconds in the energy notch to only ≈100 ps in the Ga-rich region near the Mo-back contact. NaF PDT improves recombination lifetimes by a factor of 2–2.5 in all regions of the absorber, whereas the effectiveness of the RbF PDT is found to decrease for higher Ga-concentrations. Electron mobility measured in the absorber region with large grains is promoted by both alkali PDTs. The data suggest that NaF PDT passivates shallow defect states (Urbach tail) throughout the Cu(In,Ga)Se2 film (including the interior of large grains), whereas the additional RbF PDT is effective at grain boundary surfaces (predominantly in regions with medium to low Ga-concentrations). ; Y.-H.C. thanks the Ministry of Education of Taiwan for her Ph.D. scholarship, Dr. Michael Sachs, and Dr. Carlota Bozal-Ginesta from Imperial College London for the fruitful discussions and aid on TA data. J.R.D. would like to thank the UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund project SUNRISE (EP/P032591/1). L.S. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016, Grant No. 749231). This work also received financial support partially from the Swiss State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 17.00105 (EMPIR project HyMet). The EMPIR programme is co-financed by the Participating States and by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and ...