Growth of Polycrystalline In₂S₃ Thin Films by Chemical Bath Deposition Using Acetic Acid as a Complexing Agent for Solar Cell Application

In₂S₃ films have been successfully deposited on Corning glass substrates via chemical bath deposition (CBD) method using acetic acid as a novel complexing agent. The layers were grown by employing synthesis using indium sulphate and thioacetamide (TA) as precursors by varying TA concentration in the range of 0.1–0.5 M, keeping other deposition parameters constant. Energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDAX) revealed an increase of S/In ratio in the films with the increase of TA concentration in the solution. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis indicated a change in preferred orientation from (311) plane related to cubic structure to the (103) direction corresponding to the tetragonal crystal structure. The evaluated crystallite size varied in the range of 15–25 nm with the increase of TA concentration. Morphological analysis showed that the granular structure and the granular density decrease with the raise of TA concentration. The optical properties of the layers were also investigated using UV-Vis-NIR analysis, which indicated that all the In₂S₃ films had the optical transmittance >60% in the visible region, and the evaluated energy band varied in the range of 2.87–3.32 eV with the change of TA concentration. Further, a thin film heterojunction solar cell was fabricated using a novel absorber layer, SnS, with In₂S₃ as a buffer. The unoptimized SnS/In₂S₃/ZnO:Al solar cell showed a conversion efficiency of 0.6%.