Structural and photoelectrochemical properties of CdSe thin films deposited by the vacuum evaporation technique

The structural and photoelectrochemical (PEC) properties of vacuum evaporated CdSe films using the laboratory synthesized powder as source material was studied. The substrate temperature was varied in the range 300–473 K. X-ray diffraction studies indicated preferential orientation in the (002) direction. SEM studies indicated increase of grain size from 1.0 to 3.0 μm with increase of substrate temperature. The power conversion efficiency was found to be 7.0% under an illumination of 60 mW cm−2 after photoetching. A peak quantum efficiency of 0.6 was obtained for an incident wavelength of 720 nm. Semiconducting parameters were estimated.