Recent technical and commercial successes of existing thin film solar cell technologies motivates exploration of next-generation photovoltaic (PV) absorber materials. Of particular scientific interest are compounds like CuSbSe2, which do not have the conventional tetrahedral semiconductor bonding. Here, we demonstrate 1.5 {\mu}m thick CuSbSe2 PV prototypes prepared at 380-410{\deg}C by a self-regulated sputtering process using the conventional substrate device architecture. The p-type CuSbSe2 absorber has a 1.1 eV optical absorption onset, ~105 cm−1 absorption coefficient at 0.3 eV above the onset, and a hole concentration of ~1017 cm−3. The promising >3% energy conversion efficiency (Jsc = 20 mA/cm2, FF = 0.44, Voc = 0.35 V) in these initial devices is limited by bulk recombination that limits photocurrent, device engineering issues that affect fill factor, and a photovoltage deficit that likely results from the non-ideal CuSbSe2/CdS band offset.
@article{arxiv.1505.02311,
title = {CuSbSe2 photovoltaic devices with 3% efficiency},
author = {Adam Welch and Lauryn Baranowski and Pawel Zawadzki and Stephan Lany and Colin Wolden and Andriy Zakutayev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.02311},
year = {2015}
}