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 6ยข/kWh SunShot initiative goal.