Laser scribing of Sb2Se3 thin-film solar cells

Photovoltaic cells offer a clean and sustainable solution by allowing the reduction of fossil energy. In recent decades, several types of solar cells have been proposed to overcome the limitation of stiffness of common silicon-based solar cells. Due to their flexibility, thin-film solar cell technology is now of great interest to the community. Now, most of the thin-film solar cell market belongs to CdTe or CIGS based, but its implementation involves a high cost due In/Ga and safety problem to the high toxicity of Cd. Thanks to its abundance and non-toxicity [1] Sb 2 Se 3 is one of the main candidates to overcome these limitations. Furthermore, laser scribing technology, the main candidate for guaranteeing a large production volume with a high precision manufacturing, needs to support the growth of new types of absorbent material without damaging others. In this work, Sb 2 Se 3 based solar cells have been grown by the low-temperature pulsed electron deposition (LT-PED) technique [2] and the so-called P3 process has been performed by laser scribing. Photovoltaic devices were fabricated as described in [3] with the following architecture: ZnO: Al/ZnO/CdS/Sb 2 Se 3 /Mo/Glass, shown in Figure 1a. The films were deposited onto 2.5×2.5 cm 2 soda-lime glass substrates, coated with molybdenum (Mo).