Thin layers of MoOx have been deposited by thermal evaporation followed by post-deposition annealing. The density of states distributions of the MoOx films were extracted deconvoluting the absorption spectra, measured by a photothermal deflection spectroscopy setup, including the small polaron contribution. Results revealed a sub-band defect distribution centered 1.1 eV below the conduction band; the amplitude of this distribution was found to increase with post-deposition annealing temperature and film thickness.@en

The use of transition metal oxides for the selective carrier contact in the crystalline silicon solar cells technology is rising to interest for the excellent optoelectrical properties of these materials whose implementation, however, can result in lousy performing cells due to an S-shaped electrical characteristic. In this paper, we fabricated solar cells showing S-shaped J-V curve and carried out an analysis of the reasons of such behavior using a model involving the series of a standard cell equivalent circuit with a Schottky junction in order to explain these atypical performances. A good matching between the experimental measurements and the adopted theoretical model was obtained. The extracted parameters are listed and analyzed to shade light on the reasons behind the low-performance cells.@en