Carrier lifetime in liquid-phase crystallized silicon on glass

Liquid-phase crystallized silicon on glass (LPCSG) presents a promising material to fabricate high quality silicon thin films, e.g. for solar cells and modules. Barrier layers and a doped amorphous silicon layer are deposited on the glass substrate followed by crystallization with a line focus laser beam. In this paper we introduce injection level dependent lifetime measurements generated by the quasi steady-state photoconductance decay method (QSSPC) to characterize LPCSG absorbers. This contactless method allows a determination of the LPCSG absorber quality already at an early stage of solar cell fabrication, and provides a monitoring of the absorber quality during the solar cell fabrication steps. We found minority carrier lifetimes higher than 200 ns in our layers (e.g. n-type absorber with N-D= 2x10(15)cm(-3)) indicating a surface recombination velocity S-BL<3000 cm/s at the barrier layer/Si interface. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.