A New Method of Preparing Highly Conductive Ultra-Thin Indium Tin Oxide for Plasmonic-Enhanced Thin Film Solar Photovoltaic Devices

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A new method of preparing highly conductive ultra-thin indium tin oxide for plasmonic-enhanced thin film solar photovoltaic devices. Abstract Recent numerical modeling of plasmonic metallic nanostructures have shown great potential as a method of light management in thin-film nanodisc-patterned hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar photovoltaic (PV) cells. A significant design challenge for such plasmonic-enhanced PV devices is the requirement for ultra-thin transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) with high transmittance (low loss) and low enough resistivity to be used as device top contacts/electrodes. Most work on TCOs is on relatively thick layers and the few reported cases of thin TCO showed a marked decrease in conductivity. Recent work on ultra-thin TCOs of aluminum-doped zinc oxide, indium-doped tin oxide and zinc oxide revealed an unavoidable trade-off between transmittance and resistivity when fabricated with conventional growth methods. Ultra-thin films showed a tendency to be either amorphous and continuous or form as isolated islands. This results in poor electrical properties, which cannot be improved with annealing as the delicate thin films nucleate to form grain clusters. In order to overcome this challenge, this study investigates a novel method of producing ultra-thin (

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