Silicon Solar Cell with Tunneling Oxide on Sulfur-Deficient Intrinsic MoS₂ Thin Film

The thermolytic growth of molybdenum disulfide thin films for solar cell applications is investigated. The thin films are spin-coated and thermally annealed, and they show a sulfur-deficient nanosheet structure with various spectral emissions. The intrinsic thin films are used to form heterostructures in silicon solar cells. Two types of Si solar cells are fabricated using a MoS2/p-Si heterojunction structure and MoS2/SiOx/pn-Si tunneling structure. The former heterojunction cell does not show photovoltaic cell character. However, the later oxide tunneling cell shows a short-circuit current of 8.23 A, an open-circuit voltage of 0.602 V, and a conversion efficiency of 14.6%. This indicates that the sulfur defect-induced MoS2 thin film shows an n-type Ohmic character, but it might not form a stable interfacial charge depletion layer with p-Si wafers in large-scale cell fabrication.