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Cuprous oxide (Cu2O) is a direct-gap semiconductor with band-gap energy of 2.0 eV and is regarded as one of the most promising materials for application in photovoltaic cells. Practical application has not been achieved to date because of the difficulty of controlling its electrical properties such as reducing the resistivity. It is known that silver doping is one of the effective methods to reduce the resistivity of cuprous oxide films. In this study, Ag-doped cuprous oxide films have been deposited onto Corning 1737 at a constant room temperature using a magnetron co-sputtering process in a mixture of oxygen and argon gases. It was found that the hole carrier concentration of silver doped cuprous oxide films increased from 9.0×1017 cm-3 to 3.6×1018 cm−3 as the silver sputter power from 50 to 200W. The lowest resistivity of Cu2O film doped with silver obtained in this study was 14.8Ωcm and further downed to a value of 9.5Ωcm after heat treatments in H2 at temperature above 300°C. |