Perspective: Maintaining surface-phase purity is key to efficient open air fabricated cuprous oxide solar cells

Electrochemically deposited Cu2O solar cells are receiving growing attention owing to a recent doubling in efficiency. This was enabled by the controlled chemical environment used in depositing doped ZnO layers by atomic layer deposition, which is not well suited to large-scale industrial production. While open air fabrication with atmospheric pressure spatial atomic layer deposition overcomes this limitation, we find that this approach is limited by an inability to remove the detrimental CuO layer that forms on the Cu2O surface. Herein, we propose strategies for achieving efficiencies in atmospherically processed cells that are equivalent to the high values achieved in vacuum processed cells.