Impact of zinc structural on the photovoltaic Properties of iron Pyrite

Refka Sai; Ihab Shawish; Muaffaq M Nofal; Eman A Alghamdi

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13248

Impact of zinc structural on the photovoltaic Properties of iron Pyrite

Heliyon. 2023 Jan 31;9(2):e13248. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13248. eCollection 2023 Feb.

Authors

Refka Sai^{1

2}, Ihab Shawish³, Muaffaq M Nofal³, Eman A Alghamdi⁴

Affiliations

¹ Departement de Physique, Faculté des Sciences de Bizerte, Université de Carthage, Tunisia.
² Photovoltaic Laboratory Research and Technology Center of Energy, Borj-Cedria Science and Technology Park, BP 95, 2050 Hammam-Lif, Tunisia.
³ Department of Mathematics and Sciences, Prince Sultan University, P. O. Box 66833, Riyadh 11586, Saudi Arabia.
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, King Saud University, Riyadh 11451, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

$F e S_{2}$ pyrite is one of the most interesting photovoltaic materials with low-cost and natural abundance but with small band gap of 0.95 eV. In the present work, we show the feasibility of increases band gap was determined by Zinc alloying of Iron pyrite. We showed that we can increase the band gap of $F e S_{2}$ pyrite to $1.15 e V$ by theoretical calculation and to $1.16 e V$ using experimental method, by just adding a very small amount of Zinc $(1 %) .$ We prepared our samples by chemical vapor transport technic and we utilized the technic of linear muffin-tin orbital method in the atomic-sphere approximation (LMTO-ASA). The effect of Zinc alloyed Iron pyrite were examined by transmission electron micrograph TEM, XRD, Raman spectroscopy and optical characterization.

Keywords: Band gap; Band structure; Iron pyrite.