Vacuum evaporated CdSe thin films and their characteristics

CdSe films that were vacuum deposited using the laboratory synthesized CdSe powder as source material were studied. The substrate temperature was varied in the range 30-200 °C. X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies indicated preferential orientation in the (002) direction. SEM studies indicated increase of grain size from 1.9 to 3.9 μm with increase of substrate temperature. The power conversion efficiency was found to be 7.0% under an illumination of 60 mW cm−2 after photoetching. A peak quantum efficiency of 0.6 was obtained for an incident wavelength of 720 nm. Semiconducting parameters were estimated. Preliminary studies on large area films (25 cm2) indicated an efficiency of 5.9%.