Extracting Cu diffusion parameters in polycrystalline CdTe

It is well known that Cu plays an important role in CdTe solar cell performance as a dopant. In this work, a finite-difference method is developed and used to simulate Cu diffusion in CdTe solar cells. In the simulations, which are done on a two-dimensional (2D) domain, the CdTe is assumed to be polycrystal-line, with the individual grains separated by grain boundaries. When used to fit experimental Cu concentration data, bulk and grain boundary diffusion coefficients and activation energies for CdTe can be extracted. In the past, diffusion coefficients have been typically obtained by fitting data to simple functional forms of limited validity. By doing full simulations, the simplifying assumptions used in those analytical models are avoided and diffusion parameters can thus be determined more accurately.