All-Inorganic Hydrothermally Processed Semitransparent Sb2S3 Solar Cells with CuSCN as the Hole Transport Layer

Pankaj Kumar; Martin Eriksson; Dzmitry S Kharytonau; Shujie You; Marta Maria Natile; Alberto Vomiero

doi:10.1021/acsaem.3c02492

All-Inorganic Hydrothermally Processed Semitransparent Sb₂S₃ Solar Cells with CuSCN as the Hole Transport Layer

ACS Appl Energy Mater. 2024 Feb 5;7(4):1421-1432. doi: 10.1021/acsaem.3c02492. eCollection 2024 Feb 26.

Authors

Pankaj Kumar¹, Martin Eriksson¹, Dzmitry S Kharytonau², Shujie You¹, Marta Maria Natile^{3

4}, Alberto Vomiero^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ Division of Materials Science, Department of Engineering Sciences and Mathematics, Luleå University of Technology, SE-971 87 Luleå, Sweden.
² Electrochemistry and Corrosion Laboratory, Jerzy Haber Institute of Catalysis and Surface Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, 30-239 Krakow, Poland.
³ National Research Council (CNR), Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry and Technologies for Energy (ICMATE), via F. Marzolo 1, 35131 Padova, Italy.
⁴ Department of Chemical Sciences, University of Padova, via F. Marzolo 1, 35131 Padova, Italy.
⁵ Department of Molecular Sciences and Nanosystems, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, via Torino 155, 30172 Venezia Mestre, Italy.

Abstract

An inorganic wide-bandgap hole transport layer (HTL), copper(I) thiocyanate (CuSCN), is employed in inorganic planar hydrothermally deposited Sb₂S₃ solar cells. With excellent hole transport properties and uniform compact morphology, the solution-processed CuSCN layer suppresses the leakage current and improves charge selectivity in an n-i-p-type solar cell structure. The device without the HTL (FTO/CdS/Sb₂S₃/Au) delivers a modest power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 1.54%, which increases to 2.46% with the introduction of CuSCN (FTO/CdS/Sb₂S₃/CuSCN/Au). This PCE is a significant improvement compared with the previous reports of planar Sb₂S₃ solar cells employing CuSCN. CuSCN is therefore a promising alternative to expensive and inherently unstable organic HTLs. In addition, CuSCN makes an excellent optically transparent (with average transmittance >90% in the visible region) and shunt-blocking HTL layer in pinhole-prone ultrathin (<100 nm) semitransparent absorber layers grown by green and facile hydrothermal deposition. A semitransparent device is fabricated using an ultrathin Au layer (∼10 nm) with a PCE of 2.13% and an average visible transmittance of 13.7%.