Title
Passivation properties of subnanometer thin interfacial silicon oxide films
Date Issued
01 January 2014
Access level
open access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Helmholtz Center Berlin
Publisher(s)
Elsevier Ltd
Abstract
Subnanometer thin silicon oxide films, applied as interlayer between crystalline silicon absorbers and functional layers, have demonstrated to improve interface passivation properties. Here we compare the interface defect density as well as the fixed charge of simple native air oxides to wet-chemical oxides on silicon substrates of different doping type, with different crystal orientations and after different chemical pre-treatment processes. We show that optimized wet-chemical pre-treatment and wetchemical oxidation leads to strong improvement in terms of interface defect density as compared to simple oxidation in air. Furthermore we show that such subnanometer thin layers can contain large positive fixed charges of up to 1011 cm-2. Due to excellently low defect densities for thin layers <0.5 nm, tunneling transport and thus application for solar cells with passivated contacts should be possible. While on p-type substrates such layers feature a high positive charge and would thus support an emitter band bending, on n-type substrates the charge is smaller and can even be negative due to electrons trapped in mid gap defects.
Start page
805
End page
812
Volume
55
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Recubrimiento, Películas
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84922331911
Source
Energy Procedia
ISSN of the container
18766102
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus