Research and development of fabricating high efficient photovoltaic devices rely on nanostructuring the photoabsorber layers due to the ability of manipulating photoabsorption, photocurrent generation and transport in nanometer scale. Vertically aligned, highly uniform nanorods and nanotube arrays for solar energy conversion gained renowned interest attributable to the repeated experimental results showing enhanced photoconversion efficiencies. However, controlled fabrication of specific size and shape of nanotube or nanorod arrays with a pre-determined distribution density is still a significant challenge. In this report, we demonstrate how to address this issue by fabricating copper indium selenide (CIS) nanotube arrays by electrodeposition on lithographically patterned nanoelectrodes on a series of conducting substrates. This simple technique can lay a strong foundation for the study of novel photovoltaic devices because successful fabrication of these devices solely depends on the ability to control structure-property relationships. The desired nanoelectrode pattern was created on a given conducting substrate by electron beam lithography and the semiconducting material was electrodeposited on confined nanoelectrodes to grow the preferred nanotube pattern. The fabricated CIS nanotube pattern by this method could produce an equivalent amount of photocurrent density produced by a thinfilm device while having less than 10% of semiconducting materials coverage compared to the thinfilm device. In this presentation we will discuss the fabrication and detailed characterization of CIS nanotube arrays and solar cell efficiencies. The ability of this protocol to control physical parameters of nanotubes such as diameter, wall thickness, length and the distribution density with a high degree of precision and the reproducibility make this protocol unique.

Controlled fabrication of copper-indium-selenide (CIS) nanotube arrays for high-efficiency solar energy conversion

251st National Meeting (2016)

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