Solar cells with thin Cu(In,Ga)(S,Se)2 absorber films are well established in the photovoltaics market. They offer an advantage over other thin film technologies thanks to their lower content of elements with high toxicity or low earth abundance like Cd and Te. One approach to further improve the quality of production of these cells is to develop a method of material quality assessment during production that is fast, contactless and non-destructive. Time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) measurements offer all these characteristics. This work aims to establish the requirements to extract meaningful information about charge carrier recombination dynamics and solar cell performance parameters from TRPL measurements. To achieve this goal experiments and simulations are carried out. The material parameters are extracted from experiments and then built into the simulation model. Results from experiments also serve as the basis to verify the validity of this model. Parameter variations within the simulations function as one of the main methods in this work to gain deeper physical insight into the processes taking place during TRPL measurements. engl.

The distribution of the electrostatic potential in and between the materials in Cu(In,Ga)Se2 thin-film solar cells has a major impact on their superior performance. This thesis reported on the nanoscale imaging of the electrostatic potential on untreated cross sections of operating Cu(In,Ga)Se2 solar cells using Kelvin probe force microscopy.

Tremendous progress in the development of thin film solar cell techniques has been made over the last decade. The field of organic solar cells is constantly developing, new material classes like Perowskite solar cells are emerging and different types of hybrid organic/inorganic material combinations are being investigated for their physical properties and their applicability in thin film electronics. Besides typical single-junction architectures for solar cells, multi-junction concepts are also being investigated as they enable the overcoming of theoretical limitations of a single-junction. In multi-junction devices each sub-cell operates in different wavelength regimes and should exhibit optimized band-gap energies. It is exactly this tunability of the band-gap energy that renders organic solar cell materials interesting candidates for multi-junction applications. Nevertheless, only few attempts have been made to combine inorganic and organic solar cells in series connected multi-junction architectures. Even though a great diversity...

Thin-film solar cells are cheap and easy to manufacture but require improvements as their efficiencies are low compared to that of the commercially dominant crystalline-silicon solar cells. An optoelectronic model is formulated and implemented along with the differential evolution algorithm to assess the efficacy of grading the bandgap of the CIGS, CZTSSe, and AlGaAs photon-absorbing layer for optimizing the power-conversion efficiency of thin-film CIGS, CZTSSe, and AlGaAs solar cells, respectively, in the two-terminal single-junction format. Each thin-film solar cell is modeled as a photonic device as well as an electronic device. Solar cells with two (or more) photon-absorbing layers can also be handled using the optolelectronic model, whose results will stimulate experimental techniques for bandgap grading to enable ubiquitous small-scale harnessing of solar energy.

Among other materials, the p-type Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) alloy has attracted attention as the most efficient absorber in thin-film solar cells. The typical CIGS layer is deposited with a polycrystalline structure containing an amount of native defect states, which serve as carrier traps and recombination centers. These defect states in the CIGS layer can be easily changed after deposition of an n-type buffer layer, due to the formation of p-n junctions. To understand the influence of the p-n junction on these defect states, the behavior of photoexcited carriers, from the CIGS absorber to the buffer layer, is considered to be an important issue and is closely related to solar cell performance. In this study, we performed experiments to investigate the ultrafast carrier dynamics of CIGS-based solar cells, using optical pump terahertz (THz) probe (OPTP) spectroscopy, and demonstrated the correlation between solar cell performance and the behavior of photoexcited carrier dynamics.