Antimony Chalcogenide-based Solid State Sensitizers for Solar Cells: A Forgotten Hero or Low Potential Candidate

Abstract

The use of stibnite (Sb2S3) as sensitizers in the solid-state sensitized solar cells received considerable research interest during the transition of the millennium. However, the use of perovskite diminished the research in the field and the potential of antimony chalcogenide (Sb2(S,Se)3) was not explored thoroughly. Although these materials also provide bandgap tuning like perovskite by varying the composition of S and Se, it is not as popular as perovskite mainly because of the low efficiency of the solar cells based on it. In this paper, we present a landscape of the functional role of various device parameters on the performance of Sb2(S,Se)3 based solar cells. For the purpose, we first calibrate the optoelectronic model used for the simulation with the experimental results from the literature. The model is then subjected to parametric variations to explore the performance metrics for this class of solar cells. Our results show that despite the belief that open circuit voltage is independent of contact layers doping in proper band aligned sensitized solar cells, here we observe otherwise and the open circuit voltage is indeed dependent on the doping density of the contact layers. Using the detailed numerical simulation and analytical model we further identify the performance optimization map of Sb2(S,Se)3 based sensitized solar cells.