Recently, the research achievements of "Lithium-assisted synergistic engineering of charge transport both in GBs and GI for Ag-substituted Cu2ZnSn (S, Se)4 solar cells" was published in the Journal of Energy Chemistry by Professor Wu's research group. At present, the impact factor of the journal is 7.216 and the journal is divided into JCR-1.

Article link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jechem.2020.03.007.

Although silver (Ag) substitution offers several benefits in eliminating bulk defects and facilitating interface type inversion for Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 (CZTSSe) photovoltaic (PV) technology, its further development is still hindered by the fairly low electrical conductivity due to the significant decrease of acceptors amount. In this work, a versatile Li–Ag co-doping strategy is demonstrated to mitigate the poor electrical conductivity arising from Ag through direct incorporating Li via postdeposition treatment (PDT) on top of the Ag-substituted CZTSSe absorber. Depth characterizations demonstrate that Li incorporation increases p-type carrier concentration, improves the carrier collection within the bulk, reduces the defects energy level as well as inverts the electric field polarity at grain boundaries (GBs) for Ag-substituted CZTSSe system. Benefiting from this lithium-assisted complex engineering of electrical performance both in grain interior (GI) and GBs, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) is finally increased from 9.21% to 10.29%. This systematic study represents an effective way to overcome the challenges encountered in Ag substitution, and these findings support a new aspect that the synergistic effects of double cation dopant will further pave the way for the development of high efficiency kesterite PV technology.

The first authors of this paper are Zhao Xiangyun and Chang Xiaohuan of Key Laboratory of Special Functional Materials, and the corresponding authors are Professor Wu Sixin and Associate Professor Kou Dongxing. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Science and Technology Department of Henan Province, the Education Department of Henan Province and Henan University.