The energetic impact of small CdxTey clusters on Cadmium Telluride

• Deposition of Cd, Te and CdTe particles on (100) and (111) Cd and Te surfaces
• Cd atoms are more readily sputtered from the surface than Te atoms.
• The Te terminated surfaces have a higher sticking probability than the Cd ones.
• Higher impact energies imply more sputtered atoms from the surface.

Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) is an excellent material for low-cost, high efficiency thin film solar cells. It is important to do research on how these 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. Single deposition tests have been performed, to study the behaviour of deposited clusters under different conditions. We deposit a CdxTey (x,y = 0,1) cluster onto the (100) and (111) Cd and Te terminated surfaces with energies ranging from 1 to 40 eV. More than 1000 simulations have been performed for each of these cases so as to sample the possible deposition positions and to collect sufficient statistics. The results show that Cd atoms are more readily sputtered from the surface than Te atoms and the sticking probability is higher on Te terminated surfaces than Cd terminated surfaces. They also show that increasing the deposition energy typically leads to an increase in the number of atoms sputtered from the system and tends to decrease the number of atoms that sit on or in the surface layer, whilst increasing the number of interstitials observed.