Polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) thin-film solar cell is one of promising technologies for low cost photovoltaic electricity generation. Such cells are made of a ~2 μm thin poly-Si diode structure formed on a low-cost glass superstrate. Because the glass cannot withstand prolonged treatments at temperatures much higher than its critical points, to obtain poly-Si material with acceptable electronic quality the precursor a-Si thin films with cell structure are typically crystallised at the

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... rd temperature of 600°C for 20 hrs. This lengthy annealing time leading to a large thermal budget and low throughput diminishes attractiveness of poly-Si thin film on glass solar cells. Moreover, this standard solid-phase crystallisation (SPC) results in high defect density in poly-Si, which is a major performance limiting factor. Therefore, improving poly-Si quality is the main objective of the SPC study. The focus of this thesis is SPC of Si thin-film solar cells on glass deposited by electron-beam (E-beam) evaporation, plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD), and their combination (Hybrid). The study aims to achieve the following goals: (i) to develop better understanding of SPC stages, including incubation, nucleation and crystal growth, for Si films with the solar cell structure; (ii) to identify how these stages, the resulting poly-Si thin-film quality and solar cells performance depend on SPC conditions, (iii) to find out how the film structure, i.e. dopant concentrations and the layer thicknesses, affects the crystallisation kinetics and the resulting cell performance, (iv) to examine the effects of pre-annealing conditions on the crystallisation kinetics and the resulting cell performance. The SPC of PECVD, Hybrid and E-beam poly-Si solar cell structures is studied by four characterisation techniques at different temperatures of 600, 640 and 680°C. The random nucleation in Si thin-film solar cell structures is demonstrated by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), showing initial crystallites either ne [...]