Investigation on structural properties of Al-substituted ZnS particle prepared from wet chemical synthetic route

Abstract

ZnS, a wide energy band gap semiconductor, is the potential candidates as a buffer layer for solar cells application. Here, ZnS and Al-substituted ZnS were prepared by simply chemical synthetic route with various high concentration of Al dopant from 0 at% to 40 at%. The structures of ZnS and Al-substituted ZnS powder are all in cubic zinc blende phase. Interestingly, the crystallite size slightly decreases with increasing of Al concentration. A presence of Al content is related with the absence of Zn atom indicate that aluminum is partially substituted into ZnS structure. However, the crystalline structure and morphology of Al-substituted ZnS are not dramatically affected by the aluminum dopant concentration. The band gap energy of the bulk ZnS is approximately at 3.62 eV and slightly increase with increasing of Al dopant. The photoluminescence of Al-substituted ZnS were slightly red-shift and broaden from that of bare ZnS. Keywords: ZnS, Al-substituted ZnS, Photoluminescence, Morphology