Engineering the interface energetics of solar cells by grafting molecular properties onto semiconductors

The electronic properties of semiconductor surfaces can be controlled by binding tailor-made ligands to them. Here we demonstrate that deposition of a conducting phase on the treated surface enables control of the performance of the resulting device. We describe the characteristics of the free surface of single crystals and of polycrystalline thin films of semiconductors that serve as absorbers in thin film polycrystalline, heterojunction solar cells, and report first data for actual cell structures obtained by chemical bath deposition of CdS as the window semiconductor. The trend of the characteristics observed by systematically varying the ligands suggests changes in work function rather than in band bending at the free surface, and implies that changes in band line-up, which appear to cause changes in band bending, rather than direct, ligand-induced band bending changes, dominate.