Résumé
Copper Indium Gallium deSelenide (Cu(In,Ga)Se2, CIGS) is a promising material for cost-efficient solar cells. Efficiencies above 20% have already been demonstrated in laboratory, and large area CIGS solar panels are already on the market. However, it is still an interesting issue to find efficient characterization techniques that can be used to validate the quality of the different layers at any step of the process, without having to process a complete cell and measure its electrical properties. In this work, we have deposited CIGS onto Mo coated soda lime glass by co-evaporation, using the so-called three step deposition process. Then, photoluminescence (PL) measurements were made on the samples, in the range of 10K to the room temperature, and the excitation intensity was varied in a very large range, in order to reach non-linear regime. We report the first observation of stimulated emission in mechanisms are discussed. The threshold at which sample photoluminescence changes from spontaneous to stimulated is well known to be sensitive to overall sample quality, and we propose to use this measurement as a probing tool for sample quality. This opens an interesting perspective for characterization of CIGS during solar cell processing. © (2015) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).