Inorganic structures play an important role in materials due to their versatility and diversity. A complete understanding of the structure of a material is vital to enhance the creation of new materials that fill voids in research. The rational design of these compounds is driven by the exploitation of structure-property...
As a group of promising semiconductor materials, metal chalcogenides in thin film form have been widely used in electronics and optoelectronics applications, such as solar cell devices and photon sensors. Unfortunately, the film size and product throughput are limited by the current vacuum-based thin film deposition techniques. Solution-based thin film...
In this work we consider two multiscale applications with tremendous computational complexity at the lower scale. First, we examine a model for charge transport in semicon- ductor structures with heterojunction interfaces. Due to the complex physical phenomena at the interface, the model at the design scale is unable to adequately...
Digital printing techniques offer several advantages in manufacturing electronics such as direct writing of materials, reduction of chemical waste, and scalability. In particular, printing can significantly simplify manufacturing processes by directly defining the channel area, the gate, and the source and drain contacts, allowing for lower costs and higher throughput...
The objective of the work reported herein is to explore the impact of decreasing channel thickness on radio-frequency (RF) sputtered amorphous indium-gallium-zinc oxide (a-IGZO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) electrical performance through the evaluation of drain current versus gate voltage (I[subscript D] − V[subscript G]) transfer curves. For a fixed set of...
The focus of this thesis is developing materials for thin-film transistors (TFTs). Cu₃SbS₄ is explored as p-channel layer. Cu₃SbS₄ TFTs show p-type, depletion-mode behavior with a small amount of gate-controlled modulation of the channel conductance. This behavior is consistent with Hall measurements indicating a mobility of 17 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹ and hole...
Current cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium diselenide thin-film solar cells
(TFSCs) utilize thick absorbers (2 - 4 μm). For efficient carrier extraction in these TFSCs,
the absorber layer requires high carrier mobilities and a long minority carrier lifetime, which
necessitates the use of a high purity, defect-free thin film....
The subject of this PhD thesis is part of a research domain of great present interest in new semiconductor materials for photovoltaic and thermoelectric applications. This domain contains the elaboration and the study of both Cu-based chalcogenides bulk and thin-film samples, driven by materials design principles.
One of the most...
Mixed anion compounds that form ZrCuSiAs-type crystal structures exhibit remarkable properties such as superconductivity at low temperatures,
hole conduction with optical transparency in the visible region, and exciton absorption at room temperature. In this thesis, properties of a selected group of materials out of the very large set of mixed...
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...