Spark plasma sintering of Sb2Se3 sputtering target towards highly efficient thin film solar cells

Antimony selenide (Sb 2 Se 3 ) is a potential absorber material for environment-friendly and cost-efficiently photovoltaics due to its material advantages and superior optoelectronic properties. In this work, we proposed a facile and versatile method of ball milling followed with spark plasma sintering (SPS) to prepare high-quality Sb 2 Se 3 sputtering target. Then the highly crystalline Sb 2 Se 3 thin film consisted of large crystal grains can be prepared by using radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering with an additional post-selenization heat treatment. An efficient substrate structured Sb 2 Se 3 thin film solar cell with configuration of Mo/Sb 2 Se 3 /CdS/ITO/Ag was fabricated and a champion device with highly interesting power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 5.08% has been achieved. Superior device performances are closely related to the Sb 2 Se 3 absorber layer with benign growth orientation and the Sb 2 Se 3 /CdS heterojunction interface with smooth contact, which induced less recombination loss . The combined features of homemade sputtering target and advantageous thin film preparation technology further demonstrated its attractive application potential in thin film photovoltaic scenarios.