Resilient and reproducible processing for CZTSe solar cells in the range of 10

In this paper, we present our route to fabricate Cu2ZnSnSe4 (CZTSe) thin films, which allows to achieve reproducible processing of kesterite absorber, that leads to efficiencies in the range of 10%. The article mainly focuses on the annealing process and demonstrates that controlling of the reactor pressure for selenization can be reliably used to tune the losses of volatile constituents in the absorber, enabling adjustments on the properties of the film and solar cell. The findings reveal a noteworthy resilience to small changes of the process parameters in the vicinity of optimum conditions. Interestingly, a certain pressure range for optimum Zn and Sn composition exists, which results in a broad and stable process window and enables reproducible processing of CZTSe with high power conversion efficiencies. The established process also allows simple upscaling of the device area and results in a power conversion efficiency of approximate to 8% on a large area of 2.85 cm(2). The highest efficiencies achieved by our process are around 11% for smaller lab scale devices.