Investigation of valence plasmon excitations in GMZO thin film and their suitability for plasmon-enhanced buffer-less solar cells

The approach of eliminating buffer layer in conjunction with plasmon-enhanced transparent conduction oxide (TCO) layer is an attractive methodology to realize low-cost ultrathin buffer-less solar cells (SCs) by introducing plasmon-enhanced absorption and reduced fabrication steps. Here, we report a novel method to generate wide-band sputter-stimulated plasmonic feature in Ga-doped-MgZnO (GMZO) thin-films, which are observed due to the different metallic and metal-oxide nanoclusters formation. Through an extensive analysis of photoelectron spectroscopy, spectroscopic ellipsometry, and field-emission scanning electron microscope measurements the evaluation of plasmonic features and correlation of them with various nanoclusters inside GMZO thin-film is performed. Additionally, the suitability and expected performance of plasmon-enhanced GMZO thin-film based buffer-less SCs are probed through; 1) band-offset analysis at the plasmon enhanced-GMZO/CIGSe heterojunction; 2) simulation studies to analyze the effect of conduction band-offset (CBO) on the performance of the buffer-less SCs; 3) predicting the performance of the buffer-less SC using the parameters of GMZO thin-films with varying CBO, and 4) envisaging the concept of ultrathin buffer-less SC with calculated CBO and absorber layer thickness (300 nm) for ultrathin SCs. Moreover, at the experimentally calculated band-offset with ultrathin absorber layer thickness (300 nm), theoretically calculated buffer-less SC performance parameters estimated to be open-circuit voltage (V-oc): 0.75 V, short-circuit current density (J(sc)): 17.29 mA/cm(2), fill-factor (FF): 80.5%, and efficiency (E-ff): 10.46%.