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Using atomistic simulations to model Cadmium Telluride thin film growth

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-03-23, 15:23 authored by Miao Yu, Steven KennySteven Kenny
Cadmium telluride (CdTe) is an excellent material for low-cost, high efficiency thin film solar cells. It is important to conduct research on how defects are formed during the growth process, since defects lower the efficiency of solar cells. In this work we use computer simulation to predict the growth of a sputter deposited CdTe thin film. On-the-fly kinetic Monte Carlo technique is used to simulate the CdTe thin film growth on the (1 1 1) surfaces. The results show that on the (1 1 1) surfaces the growth mechanisms on surfaces which are terminated by Cd or Te are quite different, regardless of the deposition energy (0.1\sim 10 eV). On the Te-terminated (1 1 1) surface the deposited clusters first form a single mixed species layer, then the Te atoms in the mixed layer moved up to form a new layer. Whilst on the Cd-terminated (1 1 1) surface the new Cd and Te layers are formed at the same time. Such differences are probably caused by stronger bonding between ad-atoms and surface atoms on the Te layer than on the Cd layer.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Materials

Published in

JOURNAL OF PHYSICS-CONDENSED MATTER

Volume

28

Issue

10

Pages

? - ? (11)

Citation

YU, M. and KENNY, S.D., 2016. Using atomistic simulations to model cadmium telluride thin film growth. Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, 28: 105002.

Publisher

© IOP

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016

Notes

This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. The publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0953-8984/28/10/105002.

ISSN

0953-8984

eISSN

1361-648X

Language

  • en