Epitaxial growth of CZTS on Si substrates investigated with electron backscatter diffraction

The objective of this work is to develop procedures for growing high-quality epitaxial Cu₂ZnSnS₄ thin films. We deposited our films by molecular beam epitaxy, with different growth parameters, on [100]- and [111]-oriented Si substrates. To study the growth of the films, we used electron backscatter diffraction. We found that, under the right conditions, we were able to grow epitaxial [111]-oriented CZTS films that had a common characteristic: the existence of two domains, both with the same orientation, but rotated by 60° between each other. In this paper, we investigate the reliability of the EBSD analysis to study different domains in CZTS films, and correlate the film growth with deposition parameters, attempting to gain insight on the characteristics of the boundaries between the two domains.