Investigation of recombinatoric loss mechanisms in Cu(In,Ga)Se2 thin film solar cells

Today solar cells based on the compound semiconductor Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGSe) present the highest lab scale efficiency among all thin-film technologies. The performance of elementary cells in photovoltaic modules might however be different due to thicker conductive ZnO:Al window layers, missing anti-reflection coating and occasionally less defined absorber formation on large scales. One approach to improve the elementary cell efficiency is to fine-tune the absorber composition and the in-depth band gap grading. In this work we investigated CIGSe samples with varied absorber composition in order to quantify the minority carrier collection efficiency (CE). CE is directly related to the electron diffusion length LD,n and the characteristics of the space charge region (SCR). LD,n was deduced by relating the inverse internal quantum efficiency to the penetration depth of incident photons and the SCR characteristics were obtained from capacitance-profiling of the samples. Based on these results we discuss the different photovoltaic performance observed for samples with varied CIGSe absorber composition.