High Voc in (Cu,Ag)(In,Ga)Se2 Solar Cells

In this contribution, we show that silver substitution for copper in Cu(In,Ga)Se
₂
(CIGS) to form (Ag,Cu)(In,Ga)Se
₂
(ACIGS) leads to a reduction of the voltage loss expressed as E
_g
/q -V
_oc
. This, in turn, leads to higher device efficiencies as compared to similar CIGS devices without Ag. We report V
_oc
at 814 mV at a conversion efficiency of 21% for our best ACIGS device with 20% of the group I element consisting of silver. Comparing ACIGS and CIGS devices with the same Ga/(Ga + In) ratio, the ACIGS devices exhibit about 0.05 eV higher bandgap. Alkali postdeposition treatment with KF leads to improvements in efficiency both for CIGS and ACIGS, but we find that the dose of KF needed for optimum device for ACIGS is 10-20% of the dose used for CIGS.