Electroreflectance of thin-film solar cells: Simulation and experiment

Electromodulated reflectance (ER) is a standard characterization method to determine critical points such as the band gap in the band structure of semiconductors. These critical points show up as spectrally narrow features in ER and are typically evaluated using Aspnes's third-derivative functional form. ER spectra of stratified semiconductor systems such as thin-film solar cells, however, are significantly distorted by optical interference due to their layered structure. Furthermore, strong built-in electric fields result in a deviation from the typically assumed low-field conditions. We present here simulations of ER spectra from stratified systems based on transfer matrices using the Franz-Keldysh theory in its general form. For realistic thin-film solar cell conditions, distortions of ER line shapes due to the above-mentioned interferences and strong electric fields appear in the simulations. Furthermore, the results show good agreement with measured ER spectra of a structurally well-characterized Cu(In,Ga)Se-2 (CIGS) solar cell. Our analysis points out the restrictions on the determination of energetic position and number of critical points from ER spectra of stratified systems.