I am investigating Cu2ZnSnS4 material for solar cell application. I have co-sputtered Cu, Zn and Sn. By going through literature survey people have used several techniques like EDAX, XPS some also have used synchrotron based techniques.
Some researchers won't find EDAX as reliable while in many papers it has been used!!
Some suggest XPS over EDAX.
Some researchers have used advanced synchrotron based technique.
I am willing to know suggestions on limitations and advantage of mentioned techniques.
With a good synchrotron-based setup, you can get nice data for Cu/Zn/Sn profiles. You could also use methods like LA-ICP-MS or SIMS; however you should be aware that with such sample-destroying techniques you might get effects like diffusion of Cu during the mesurement due to thermal effects.
However, you will miss the light elements. My experience is, that in semiconductor/solar cell production the hydrogen content might be crucial (depending on the production method/paramenters). Unfortunately, most of the standard analytical techniques will miss H. If you have access to nuclear analytics at an accelerator, like NRA (nuclear resonance analysis) or ERDA (elastic recoil detection), this could be a possibility.
I agree with Erik, but I would like to add that sulfur is also feasible with XRF, even in a non-vacuum environment. For thin films, I would recomment grazing incidence XRF as you can control the penetration depth (and thereby the analysis depth). If you carefully deconvolute your XRF data, then you may get the depth profile of all the elements you are interested in.
In terms of CZTS as an absorber (~2 µm thickness) for solar cells combined STEM/EDX is a good choice. CZTS has a small existence region and tends to decompose quite easily into secondary phases like ZnS which can be on the nano-scale. So, a lot of techniques have problems to distinguish between several phases due to their spatial resolution like conventional EDX/WDX. With XANES you can distinguish between several phases and determine even the volume fraction. But still you have no spatial information. Therefore, STEM/EDX is a good choice to analyse the microstructure and to determine the composition. But this technique is also limited to ~100 nm (too low EDX signal). Another option is to use APT (atom probe tomography). With APT you can determine the composition on a much smaller length scale.
Best regards
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