Doped microcrystalline silicon oxide alloys for silicon‐based photovoltaics: Optoelectronic properties, chemical composition, and structure studied by advanced characterization techniques Conferences uri icon

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abstract

  • Doped microcrystalline silicon oxide (μc‐SiOx:H) alloys attract significant attention as a functional material in photovoltaic devices. By using various advanced characterization methods, we have studied the relationship between optoelectronic properties, chemical composition, and structure of p‐type µc‐SiOx:H deposited by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). For a wide range of compositions with varying oxygen content, we show that the dominant components are Si and a‐SiO2, while the fraction of suboxides is minor. The μc‐SiOx:H material with sufficient oxygen content (x = 0.35) exhibits an enlarged optical gap E04 > 2.2 eV and sufficiently high dark conductivity >10−6 S cm−1; the crystalline silicon fraction has a filament‐like shape (with a typical width of around 10 nm) forming a branch‐like structure elongated in the growth direction over several hundreds of nanometers.

authors

  • Smirnov, V
  • Lambertz, A
  • Moll, Sandra
  • Bär, M
  • Starr, DE
  • Wilks, RG
  • Gorgoi, M
  • Heidt, A
  • Luysberg, M
  • Holländer, B
  • Finger, F

publication date

  • July 2016