Photoluminescence studies in epitaxial CZTSe thin films

Epitaxial Cu2ZnSnSe4 (CZTSe) thin films were grown by molecular beam epitaxy on GaAs(001) using two different growth processes, one containing an in-situ annealing stage as used for solar cell absorbers and one for which this step was omitted. Photoluminescences (PL) measurements carried out on these samples show no dependence of the emission shape on the excitation intensity at different temperatures ranging from 4 K to 300 K. To describe the PL measurements, we employ a model with fluctuating band edges in which the density of states of the resulting tail states does not seem to depend on the excited charge carrier density. In this interpretation, the PL measurements show that the annealing stage removes a defect level, which is present in the samples without this annealing.