Effect of working pressure on the properties of RF sputtered SnS thin films and photovoltaic performance of SnS-based solar cells

摘要： Tin sulfide (SnS) thin films were deposited with a single SnS target by radio frequency magnetron sputtering while varying the working pressure (0.6 Pa to 2.6 Pa), and the structural, chemical, electricelectrical and optical properties of the SnS thin films were investigated. X-ray diffraction results showed that all the SnS thin films had a (111) plane preferred growth orientation, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy verified that a SnS thin film was grown with an orthorhombic crystal structure, having the binding energy of 324.5 eV. Due to a long wavelength shift in the transmittance spectrum, the optical band gap decreased from 1.56 eV to 1.47 eV. A SnS-based conventional structure solar cell (Al/ITO/i-ZnO/CdS/SnS/Mo/SLG), prepared with a SnS absorption layer and deposited at a working pressure of 2.0 Pa, achieves the highest power conversion efficiency of 0.58%. It is confirmed that this result reveal to very high efficiency compared to other reports with conventional structure.