Emergence of a terawatt scalable photovoltaic (PV) thin film technology is currently impeded by
the limited supply of relatively rare elements like In or Te, which has spurred active research in
recent years on earth-abundant PV materials. Instead of searching for alternative PV materials,
we approach the problem here by...
The p-type semiconductor Cu₃PSe₄ has recently been established to have a direct band gap of 1.4 eV and an optical absorption spectrum similar to GaAs [Foster et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 99, 181903 (2011)], suggesting a possible application as a solar photovoltaic absorber. Here we calculate the thermodynamic stability, defect...