Femtosecond laser-assisted photovoltaic bottom-up strategies
- A promising technology in photovoltaics is based on micro-concentrator solar cells, where the photovoltaic active area is realized as an array of sub-millimeter sized thin-film solar cells. Different approaches to produce micro-sized precursors of CIGSe absorbers on molybdenum are presented using 30-fs laser pulses at 790 nm wavelength. On the one hand, a multi pulse surface structuring of the molybdenum or the underlying glass substrate and a subsequent physical vapor deposition (PVD) process were used for a site-selective aggregation of indium droplets. On the other hand, a single pulse laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) was utilized to selectively deposit combined copper/indium/gallium precursor pixels on the molybdenum back contact of the solar cell. It was demonstrated that a postprocessing of the laser-generated micro-sized precursors results in an array of working CIGSe solar cells with an efficiency of 2.9% for 1 sun Illumination.