In-situ X-ray Microscopy

Our goal is to address the following industrially relevant effects :

1. Operando electromigration of species of species to grain boundaries, dislocations and interfaces
2. Metastable defects observed in CIGS after illumination and/or applied bias voltage
3. Nanoscale phase segregation as a function of growth conditions
4. Phase decomposition and interlayer diffusion as a function of kinetics and thermodynamics of annealing (time, temperature, atmosphere, and constituent element overpressures)
5. Correlate the impacts of these effects on solar cell conversion efficiency.

Understanding the effects of elemental and charge migration under operating conditions will allow the CIGS community to modify and/or add processing steps that could claim the open circuit voltages allowing the cells to harvest more energy from each absorbed photon and position this technology closer to the 6¢/kWh SunShot initiative goal.