A study on the band structure of ZnO/CdS heterojunction for CIGS solar-cell application

In this paper, ZnO films were prepared by atomic layer deposition (ALD) and CdS films were deposited using chemical bath deposition (CBD) to form ZnO/CdS heterojunction. More accurate mapping of band arrangement of the ZnO/CdS heterojunction has been performed by analyzing its electrical and optical characteristics in depth by various methods including transmittance, x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS), and ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy (UPS). The optical bandgap energies (E_g) of ZnO and CdS were 3.27 eV and 2.34 eV, respectively. UPS was capable of extracting the ionization potential energies (IPEs) of the materials, which turned out to be 8.69 eV and 7.30 eV, respectively. The electron affinity (EA) values of ZnO and CdS calculated from IPE and E_g were 5.42 eV and 4.96 eV, respectively. Energy-band structures of the heterojunction could be accurately drawn from these parameters taking the conduction band offset (CBO) into account, which will substantially help acquisition of the full band structures of the thin films in the CIGS solar-cell device and contribute to the optimal device designs.