Room-temperature recombination dynamics has been investigated in a large set of different Cu(In,Ga)Se2 absorber films and compared to the electrical device characteristics of the respective solar cell modules. For a given cell preparation process, a characteristic relation between the low-injection minority-carrier lifetime of the absorber layers and the conversion efficiency of the solar cells is observed: Long lifetimes correlate with high open circuit voltages and conversion efficiencies, while no significant influence of the lifetime on the short circuit current is found.
We present experimental results concerning optical transitions and carrier dynamics (capture and relaxation) in self assembled InAs/GaAs quantum dot structures grown by metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy. Photoluminescence (PL) measurements at high excitation level reveal optical transitions above the ground state emission. These transitions are found to originate from occupied hole states by solving the quantum dot eigenvalue problem. Time-resolved studies after non-resonant pulse excitation exhibit a relaxation ladder of the excited carriers from the GaAs barrier down to the ground state of the quantum dots. From both the continuous-wave measurements and the PL-decay curves we conclude that the carrier relaxation at non-resonant excitation is mediated by Coulomb interaction (Auger effect). PL-decay curves after resonant pulse excitation reveal a longer rise time compared to non-resonant excitation which is a clear indication of a relaxation bottleneck inside the quantum dots. We interpret the rise time (≊ 400 ps) in this case to originate from relaxation via scattering by acoustic phonons. The PL-decay time of the ground state emission ≊700 ps is interpreted as the excitonic lifetime of the quantum dot.
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