Study of the surface properties of ZnO nanocolumns used for thin-film solar cells

• Neda Neykova,
• Jiri Stuchlik,
• Karel Hruska,
• Ales Poruba,
• Zdenek Remes and
• Ognen Pop-Georgievski

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2017, 8, 446–451, doi:10.3762/bjnano.8.48

• Densely packed ZnO nanocolumns (NCs), perpendicularly oriented to the fused-silica substrates were directly grown under hydrothermal conditions at 90 °C, with a growth rate of around 0.2 μm/h. The morphology of the nanostructures was visualized and analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The

• development of thin film solar cells based on ZnO NCs. Keywords: 3-dimensional solar cells; hydrothermal growth; optical spectroscopy; photothermal deflection spectroscopy; plasma treatment; X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy; ZnO nanocolumns; Introduction The widely accepted design of thin-film silicon (TF

• advantageously used for all other thin-film solar cells. So far, a wide diversity of methods have been used for the preparation of ZnO nanocolumns such as metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) [11], electrochemical deposition [12], sputtering [13], reactive ion etching [5] and the hydrothermal method