Effect of vicinal substrates on the growth and device performance of quantum dot solar cells

Abstract During quantum dot (QD) growth, substrate misorientation has been shown to play a role in the QD growth mechanism, changing their size, shape and density. Since various misorientation angles are used in production of solar cells, this work investigates QD enhanced GaAs p-i-n solar cells grown using the Stranski–Krastanov (SK) growth method on substrates misoriented either 2° or 6° off the (100) in the [ 1 1 ¯ 0 ] direction. Results of this work show that 2° misoriented samples have a lower critical thickness for InAs QD formation as compared to the 6° misorientation: ∼1.7 monolayers (ML) versus∼1.8 ML, respectively. In addition, the 6° substrates showed a more uniform QD density and size distribution of QDs without significant QD coalescence. Photoluminescence of both substrate types shows that the QD ground state transitions are similar in wavelength. Results of the solar cells under one sun illumination show that QD cells grown on both 2° and 6° substrates have higher short-circuit current density than comparable cells without QD and maintain a high open-circuit voltage. The QD contributed short-circuit current density was normalized for QD size and density for both the 2° and 6° samples. Values of 360 A/cm 2 per cm 3 of InAs and 400 A/cm 2 per cm 3 of InAs were found for the 2° and 6° samples, respectively. For both substrate types, the reduced number of coalesced QDs promoted effective strain balancing, while the increased QD density lead to strong QD absorption.