Rapid thermal annealing treatment of ZnO: Al films for photovoltaic applications

We investigated the effect of rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on ZnO: Al (AZO) films prepared at different substrate temperature, the results revealed that the resistivity decreased while crystallinity drastically improved after post annealing treatment. In addition, the amorphous/crystalline silicon heterojunction solar cell was fabricated with AZO films as transparent conductive oxide films. The conversion efficiency of solar cell enhanced significantly after post RTA treatment at 500 °C for 5 min, which due to the improvements of crystallinity, conductivity and transmission of AZO films. The results suggested that RTA treatment was an effective approach to improve the conversion efficiency of heterojunction solar cell.