R-EBIC study of the electrical activity of grain boundaries in CdTe and Cd(S,Te)

Author

Durose, Ken ; Sadler, James R E ; Yates, Andrew ; Szczerbakow, Andrzej

Author_Institution

Dept. of Phys., Durham Univ., UK

fYear

2000

fDate

2000

Firstpage

487

Lastpage

490

Abstract

The remote EBIC (R-EBIC) method has been used to investigate the band bending at crystal boundaries in undoped bulk vapour grown samples of CdTe and CdS_0.036Te_0.964. For the CdTe samples peak and trough contrast consistent with downward band bending was seen for grain, twin and sub-grain boundaries. This was accentuated near to boundaries with wrong bonds but electrical activity was diminished near to Te inclusions located at such boundaries. For the CdS_xTe _1-x samples contrast at twin boundaries consistent with upward band bending was observed. Hence both Te enrichment and the sulphur containing composition x=0.036 are shown associated with electrical activity that is desirable from the standpoint of solar cell operation at least for the bulk samples studied in this work

Keywords

EBIC; II-VI semiconductors; cadmium compounds; defect states; grain boundaries; inclusions; solar cells; subboundary structure; twin boundaries; CdS_0.036Te_0.964; CdS_xTe_1-x; CdTe; R-EBIC method; Te enrichment; Te inclusions; band bending; crystal boundaries; downward band bending; electrical activity; grain boundaries; solar cell operation; sub-grain boundaries; sulphur containing composition; twin boundaries; undoped bulk vapour grown samples; upward band bending; wrong bonds; Bonding; Conducting materials; Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy; Electrons; Grain boundaries; Impurities; Lattices; Photovoltaic cells; Physics; Tellurium;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, 2000. Conference Record of the Twenty-Eighth IEEE

Conference_Location

Anchorage, AK

ISSN

0160-8371

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5772-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PVSC.2000.915878

Filename

915878