Toward Mass-Production of Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Solar Cells: Scalable Growth of Photovoltaic-Grade Multilayer WSe2 by Tungsten Selenization

Semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are promising for high-specific-power photovoltaics due to desirable band gaps, high absorption coefficients, and ideally dangling-bond-free surfaces. Despite their potential, the majority of TMD solar cells are fabricated in a non-scalable fashion using exfoliated materials due to the absence of high-quality, large-area, multilayer TMDs. Here, we present the scalable, thickness-tunable synthesis of multilayer tungsten diselenide (WSe₂) films by selenizing pre-patterned tungsten with either solid source selenium or H₂Se precursors, which leads to smooth, wafer-scale WSe₂ films with a layered van der Waals structure. The films have charge carrier lifetimes up to 144 ns, over 14x higher than large-area TMD films previously demonstrated. Such high carrier lifetimes correspond to power conversion efficiency of ~22% and specific power of ~64 W g⁻¹ in a packaged solar cell, or ~3 W g⁻¹ in a fully-packaged solar module. This paves the way for the mass-production of high-efficiency multilayer WSe₂ solar cells at low cost.