Recent studies on In2S3 containing oxygen thin films

Attention has recently been paid to In2S3 thin films because of their potential application as buffer layer in CIGS-based solar cells. In this paper, the recent studies performed on such thin films deposited by chemical bath deposition (CBD) and physical vacuum deposition (PVD) are reported and compared. The main part of the experimental results exposed concerns the wide band gap PVD deposited β-In2S3 thin films. The influence of the synthesis conditions on the physico-chemical, optical, and electrical properties are reported and discussed in the paper. The oxygen present in the CBD and PVD films has been found to be the origin of their optical properties, which make them a good candidate to substitute CdS in thin films solar cells as buffer layer. The films have a n-type electrical conductivity and their optical band gap is about 2.8 eV.