Regular Article

Influence of the dopant concentration on structural, optical and photovoltaic properties of Cu-doped ZnS nanocrystals based bulk heterojunction hybrid solar cells^*

¹ Department of Chemistry, Quaid-e Azam University, Islamabad, 45320, Pakistan
² Department of Chemistry, Queen’s University, Kingston, K7L 5C4 ON, Canada
³ Department of General and Inorganic Chemistry, University of Pardubice, 53210, Czech Republic
⁴ Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy, Queen’s University, Kingston, K7L 5C4 ON, Canada

^a e-mail: dineshpathak80@gmail.com
^b e-mail: nunzim@queensu.ca

Received: 2 April 2017
Revised: 30 April 2017
Accepted: 4 May 2017
Published online: 14 June 2017

Abstract

Zinc sulphide (ZnS) and Cu-doped ZnS nanoparticles were synthesized by the wet chemical method. The nanoparticles were characterized by UV-visible, fluorescence, fourier transform infra-red (FTIR) spectrometry, X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectrometry (XPS), field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) and high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). Scanning electron microscopy supplemented with EDAX was employed to observe the morphology and chemical composition of the un-doped and doped samples. A significant blue shift of the absorption band with respect to the un-doped zinc sulphide was sighted by increasing the Cu concentration in the doped sample with decreasing the size of nanoparticles. Consequently, the band gap was tuned from 3.13 to 3.49 eV due to quantum confinement. The green emission arises from the recombination between the shallow donor level (sulfur vacancy) and the t₂ level of Cu²⁺. However, the fluorescence emission spectrum of the undoped ZnS nanoparticles was deconvoluted into two bands, which are centered at 419 and 468 nm. XRD analysis showed that the nanomaterials were in cubic crystalline state. XRD peaks show that there were no massive crystalline distortions in the crystal lattice when the Cu concentration (0.05–0.1 M) was increased in the ZnS lattice. However, in the case of Cu-doped samples (0.15–0.2 M), the XRD pattern showed an additional peak at 37° due to incomplete substitution occurring during the experimental reaction step. A comparative study of surfaces of undoped and Cu-doped ZnS nanoparticles were investigated using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The synthesized nanomaterial in combination with poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) was used in the fabrication of solar cells. The devices with ZnS nanoparticles showed an efficiency of 0.31%. The overall power conversion efficiency of the solar cells at 0.1 M Cu content in doped ZnS nanoparticles was found to be 1.6 times higher than the reference device (P3HT:ZnS). Furthermore, atomic force microscopy and X-ray diffraction techniques were employed to study morphology and packing behavior of blends of nanocrystals and polymer respectively.