Applications of admittance spectroscopy in photovoltaic devices beyond majority-carrier trapping defects

Admittance spectroscopy is commonly used to characterize majority-carrier trapping defects. In today's practical photovoltaic devices, however, a number of other physical mechanisms may contribute to the admittance measurement and interfere with the data interpretation. Such challenges arise due to the violation of basic assumptions of conventional admittance spectroscopy such as single-junction, ohmic contact, highly conductive absorbers, and measurement in reverse bias. We exploit such violations to devise admittance spectroscopy-based methods for studying the respective origins of “interference”: majority-carrier mobility, non-ohmic contact potential barrier, minority-carrier inversion at heterointerface, and minority-carrier lifetime in a device environment. These methods are applied to a variety of photovoltaic technologies: CdTe, Cu(In, Ga)Se₂, Si HIT cells, and organic photovoltaic materials.