Welcome

About the lab

(Opto)electronics and Thin Films Laboratory (OTFL) was established in July 2011. The primary research focus of our group is to fundamentally understand, optimize and fabricate industrial-grade films for inorganic thin film solar cell applications. To this end, our group is involved in fabricating the transparent conductors (TCs), absorbers and buffer layers using both the vacuum and non-vacuum based synthesis techniques. The second focus of the research group is to understand the role of the interfaces in developing the microstructure of the ultra-thin films on a substrate surface. To this end, detailed thermodynamic analysis taking into account the energies of the interfaces (i.e., energy of the substrate/film interface and energy of the film/vacuum interface) aside from the bulk Gibbs free energy of the film are used to estimate the total Gibbs free energy. The phase transformation in these thin films is then investigated with respect to a wide range of model parameters. The theoretical predictions are finally verified with the experimentally obtained results.