Advanced materials development for multi-junction monolithic photovoltaic devices

We report results in three areas of research relevant to the fabrication of monolithic multi-junction photovoltaic devices. (1) The use of compliant intervening layers grown between highly mismatched materials, GaAs and GaP (same lattice constant as Si), is shown to increase the structural quality of the GaAs overgrowth. (2) The use of digital alloys applied to the MBE growth of GaAs{sub x}Sb{sub l-x} (a candidate material for a two junction solar cell) provides increased control of the alloy composition without degrading the optical properties. (3) A nitrogen plasma discharge is shown to be an excellent p-type doping source for CdTe and ZnTe, both of which are candidate materials for a two junction solar cell