Quasi-Single Crystalline Cuprous Oxide Wafers via Stress-Assisted Thermal Oxidation for Optoelectronic Devices

P-type semiconductor cuprous oxide (Cu2O) offers promising optoelectronic applications such as solar cells and photodetectors owing to its considerable absorption coefficients and high carrier mobility. However, polycrystalline Cu2O films with low carrier mobility resulting from excessive grain boundaries and structure disorder fail to meet the demands for these optoelectronic applications. Here a stress-assisted thermal oxidation method to fabricate p-type -textured quasi-single crystalline Cu2O (c-Cu2O) wafers with centimeter-scale grains is developed. It is found that strain energy induced by thermal contact stress plays a critical role in crystal growth. The resultant -textured quasi-single c-Cu2O wafers exhibit excellent crystallinity with rocking curve having a low full width at half maximum of 0.022 degrees, a low defect density of 2 x 10(11) cm(-3), a high mobility exceeding 100 cm(2) V-1 s(-1), and a long minority lifetime of 98.5 mu s. Such quasi-single c-Cu2O wafers lead to efficient solar cells with an open-circuit voltage of 0.95 V and highly responsive photodetectors with superior cycling stability. These results indicate not only the advancement of fabricating high-quality Cu2O wafers upon controllable methodology but also the promising optoelectronic applications using p-type metal oxide semiconductors.

Automated summary

A stress-assisted thermal oxidation method was developed to fabricate high-quality Cu2O wafers with excellent crystallinity and optoelectronic properties, which can be applied in efficient solar cells and responsive photodetectors.