Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - National Institute of Laser - Department of Laser Sciences and Interactions

Copper-zinc-sulfur (Cu-Zn-S) ternary compound was reported as a promising material for variety of optical device applications. This compound was first reported and developed as absorber layer in solar cells in 2013 by N. Kitagawa et. al. [7]. They reported that this material is a p-type semiconductor material that has wide direct band gap and good absorbance to visible light. Cu-Zn-S has been used as alternative to the complex compound CZTS (Se) of four or five elements. In addition, little work has been done in investigating the effect of doping on the properties of Cu-Zn-S thin films. Thus, in this work, preparation of undoped and Ag doped Cu-Zn-S thin films have been reported using low temperature (280{u02DA}c), low cost sol gel spin coating method without sulfurization. For this objective, several films of Cu-Zn-S and Ag doped Cu-Zn-S with different Ag concentrations have been deposited on different substrates (Glass and n, p-type Silicon) with different thickness of 5 or 8 layers. The effects of Ag doping and the film thickness on the structural, morphological, optical and electrical properties of the films prepared on glass substrates have been presented. It has been found that both Ag free Cu-Zn-S thin film sample (S0) and Ag doped Cu-Zn-S thin film samples with 0.5% (S1), 1%(S2) and 2%(S3) show polycrystalline structure of hexagonal and cubic crystal structure using X-ray diffraction. Scanning electron microscope images show that all samples have good homogeneity and cover all the area of the substrates specially, 1% Ag doped sample have less porous structure. Energy dispersive spectroscopy results have been presented for reporting chemical composition of the constituting elements

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