Cadmium Sulfide Thin Films Were Deposited

Abstract
Cadmium Sulfide thin films were deposited on soda-lime glass substrates by

chemical bath deposition technique at bath pH varying from 8 to 11. The
films were annealed at temperature 120 °C for 5 min using radiative
annealing. The best film coverage at thickness ~ 99 nm, with bandgap
2.15 eV and resistivity of 0.5x101 Ωcm was obtained at a bath pH 10.
Introduction
CdS is considered as one of the best-suited buffer layers for CdTe,
CuZnSnSe2, CuInGaSe2 absorber layers in the heterojunction solar cell [1]. It
has a direct bandgap of 2.2 to 2.42 eV at room temperature [2]. Hexagonal
(wurtzite, P63mc) [3], and cubic (zincblende, F43m) [4] are two polymorphs
of CdS with hexagonal being stable at room temperature. While several
processing techniques such as vacuum evaporation, sputtering, spray
pyrolysis and chemical bath deposition(CBD) [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] have been
developed, CBD became most popular for solar cell applications, mainly
because of its simplicity, high reproducibility, and ease of thickness control
[2], [6]. CBD involves dipping the substrate in a chemical bath containing
Cd2+ and S2- followed by annealing in conventional furnaces at
temperatures > 150 °C for several minutes/hours [7], [10], [11]. The particle
size, surface morphology and optical properties of the deposited CdS thin
films depend on the stability constant of cadmium sources and pH of the
solution during CBD [3], [5], [12]. Several attempts were made to reduce the
processing time and exposure to higher temperatures, which results in inter-
diffusion and degradation of already deposited layers [7], [8]. Earlier,
attempts to achieve crystalline CdS thin films by quick annealing (≤5 min)
required higher annealing temperatures>400 °C [4], [13]. To the best of our
knowledge, there are no reports of CdS thin films processing within 5 min at
temperatures as low as 120 °C to achieve crystalline films with desired
bandgap and coverage. Rapid thermal annealing (RTA) utilises radiative
heating of films for a few seconds/minutes, where most of light is absorbed
by the top layer while the underneath layers remain largely unaffected. This
would be a unique benefit of radiative annealing methods for processing
multilayer systems such as solar cells.
Here, we report the deposition of CdS thin films on soda-lime glass (SLG) by
CBD technique at varying bath pH values to optimise the film coverage and
thickness. As-deposited films were annealed at low temperature (120 °C) for
5 min in a radiative annealing chamber.
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Section snippets
Experimental
CdS thin films were deposited by CBD technique. Solutions of 6.7 mmol of
cadmium acetate hydrate (Cd(CH3COO)2, ≥99.99%), 83 mmol of thiourea
(CH4N2S, ≥ 99.0%) in DI water and 0.5 M NH4OH (25% GR, Merck) were
separately prepared. The three solutions were heated to 95 °C and mixed in
a bath. The pH of the solution was maintained by regulating the amount of
NH4OH solution while the bath temperature was maintained at 80 °C. To
deposit the CdS thin films, the SLG substrate was submerged into the
Result and discussion
Scanning electron microscopy revealed that the morphology, grain sizes and
the yield of the CdS thin films were strongly dependent on the bath pH. At
bath pH of 8 (Fig. 1a), the thin film was porous, and the coverage was not
uniform (Fig. 1b) with clusters of average size 47 ± 18 nm. The primary gains
in the cluster were in the range of 21.35 ± 3.27 nm. The average (of more
than five different points) Cd:S atomic ratio obtained from EDS was ~ 5:1. On
increasing the bath pH to 9, the grain size
Conclusions
Phase pure wurtzite-CdS thin films were obtained by radiative annealing (at
120 °C for 5 min) of CBD deposited films, saving a lot on thermal budget
when compared to the furnace annealing. The thickness of the films reduced
from ~125 to 83 nm, while the bandgap increased from 2.15 to 2.31 eV on
increasing the bath pH from 8 to 11. A ~ 99 nm thick, stoichiometric CdS
film, with uniform coverage having a bandgap and resistivity
~3.01 × 101 Ωcm suitable for solar cells buffer layer application was
CRediT authorship contribution statement
M S Pradeepkumar: Investigation, Methodology, Formal Analysis, Writing -
original draft, Writing - review & editing. H V Singh: Investigation,
Methodology. S Kumar: Investigation, Methodology. J Basu: Supervision,
Writing - review & editing. Md. Imteyaz Ahmad: Formal Analysis, Funding
acquisition, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests
or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work
reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the DST-SERB, New Delhi, for financial
support (Sanction no. ECR/2016/000854).
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Abstract

Cadmium Sulfide thin films were deposited on soda-lime glass substrates by

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