Review on the Materials Properties and Photoelctrochemical (PEC) Solar Cells of CdSe, Cd1-xZnxSe, Cd1-xInxSe, Thin Films

Abstract

CdSe and its Zn/In/suitable element doped films are very important interesting materials for the realization of electronic and photoelectronic devices for energy conversion. The growth of ternary In/Zn/Cd selenides opens up the possibility of their applications for novel opto-electronic devices in the visible region of electromagnetic radiation. The (CdZn)Se and (CdIn)Se systems enable a tunable band gap region between 1.72 and 2.82 eV at normal temperature facilitating the development of several new light emitting diodes, photo detectors, blue green lasers. Thin films of these materials are usually synthesized by molecular beam epitaxy, electron beam evaporation and chemical techniques. Many researchers have reported about these materials prepared by different techniques and their properties as well as their use in PEC cell fabrication mainly followed by other optoelectronic devices also. This review gives an account of all these data in a representative distributed manner so as to cover many decades of published papers in this ever green topic of energy conversion research.