The Pivotal Role of Thermal Annealing of Cadmium Telluride Thin Film in Optimizing the Performance of CdTe/Si Solar Cells

The main focus of this framework is the preparation of CdTe nanocrystalline thin films (~120 nm) on single crystal p-Si wafers (270 μm) with Miller index (100) using thermal evaporation. Then, the In/n-CdTe/p-Si/Al solar cell was successfully fabricated. The dark I–V characteristics for the fabricated solar cell have been determined in range of 300–375 K and an applied voltage range of − 2 to 2 V. The fabricated solar cell's behavior was thoroughly explained. As a result, the important parameters for the fabricated solar cell such as the rectification ratio \({\text{RR}}\), the junction resistance \(R_{{\text{J}}}\), ideality factor of solar cell n, the shunt resistance \(R_{{{\text{sh}}}}\), the series resistance \(R_{{\text{s}}}\), the barrier height created at the interface between the CdTe thin film and the p-Si wafer \(\phi_{b}\), the energy of trap level \(E_{{\text{t}}}\) and the activation energy of carriers’s recombination in the depletion region \(\Delta E\) were determined. Finally, the Poole–Frenkel \(\beta_{{{\text{PF}}}}\) and Schottky \(\beta_{{\text{S}}}\) parameters were computed.