New facile and controllable approaches to fabricating metal chalcogenide thin films with adjustable properties can significantly expand the scope of these materials in numerous optoelectronic and photovoltaic devices. Most traditional and especially wet-chemical synthetic pathways suffer from a sluggish ability to regulate the composition and have difficulty achieving the high-quality structural properties of the sought-after metal chalcogenides, especially at large 2D length scales. In this effort, and for the first time, we illustrated the fast and complete inversion of continuous SnSe thin-films to Sb2Se3 using a scalable top-down ion-exchange approach. Processing in dense solution systems yielded the formation of Sb2Se3 films with favorable structural characteristics, while oxide phases, which are typically present in most Sb2Se3 films regardless of the synthetic protocols used, were eliminated. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations performed on intermediate phases show strong relaxations of the atomic lattice due to the presence of substitutional and vacancy defects, which likely enhances the mobility of cationic species during cation exchange. Our concept can be applied to customize the properties of other metal chalcogenides or manufacture layered structures.
Keywords: DFT calculation; chemical transformation; doping; ion exchange; thin films.