High-Efficiency Ferroelectric-Film Solar Cells with an n-type Cu2O Cathode Buffer Layer
- 14 May 2012
- journal article
- letter
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in Nano Letters
- Vol. 12 (6), 2803-2809
- https://doi.org/10.1021/nl300009z
Abstract
Becasue of the existence of interface Schottky barriers and depolarization electric field, ferroelectric films sandwiched between top and bottom electrodes are strongly expected to be used as a new kind of solar cells. However, the photocurrent with a typical order of μA/cm2 is too low to be practical. Here we demonstrate that the insertion of an n-type cuprous oxide (Cu2O) layer between the Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) film and the cathode Pt contact in a ITO/PZT/Pt cell leads to the short-circuit photocurrent increasing 120-fold to 4.80 mA/cm2 and power conversion efficiency increasing of 72-fold to 0.57% under AM1.5G (100 mW/cm2) illumination. Ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy and dark J–V characteristic show an ohmic contact on Pt/Cu2O, an n+–n heterojunction on Cu2O/PZT and a Schottky barrier on PZT/ITO, which provide a favorable energy level alignment for efficient electron-extraction on the cathode. Our work opens up a promising new method that has the potential for fulfilling cost-effective ferroelectric-film photovoltaic.Keywords
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