Achievement

This year all the research trainees as well as associates (seven in all) in the solar research lab at Purdue learned the science of making nanocrystal based solar cells. This included learning how to make nanocrystals of copper indium gallium disulfide (CIGS) as well as of copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS), dispersing the resulting nanocrystals in a proper medium to form ink, using doctor blade technique to form light absorber film from ink and then completing the solar cell by putting n-layer, top transparent conducting oxide and charge collection metallic grid. They also characterized the resulting film for their structure as well as overall solar cell performance. All this effort led to the publication of 7.2% efficient CZTS solar cells in Journal of American Chemical Society. This is the second highest efficiency reported in the literature for this important earth abundant material and is second only to IBM researchers!