Also called Sb₂Se₃, Sb₂S₃, Bi₂S₃, antimony selenide
The solar absorber that is van der Waals in one direction. Sb2Se3 is built from covalent ribbons that only touch each other weakly, so a grain boundary between two aligned ribbons has no dangling bonds to trap carriers – the reason these films tolerate the kind of polycrystalline growth that ruins most absorbers. The compounds are binary, cheap, non-toxic and stable, and the same weak bonding that helps the solar cells also makes Sb2S3 and Sb2Se3 the lowest-loss phase-change materials for programmable photonic chips.
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A quasi-one-dimensional crystal in three dimensions: within a ribbon the bonding is covalent, between ribbons it is dispersion-dominated, so calculations need van der Waals corrections and an anisotropic effective mass that differs by a factor of several between along-ribbon and cross-ribbon directions. The much-cited claim that grain boundaries are benign rests on surfaces of aligned ribbons having no dangling bonds, which makes defect calculations at realistic boundaries the interesting test. Native defects – antimony and selenium vacancies and antisites – set the doping and the band tails that limit open-circuit voltage.
Orientation is the measurement that matters: X-ray diffraction texture, specifically how much of the film grows with ribbons pointing out of the plane, predicts device performance better than grain size does. Report the deposition route and substrate temperature together, since they set that texture. For phase-change work, quote the crystalline and amorphous refractive indices and the loss at the operating wavelength, and count switching cycles rather than single-shot contrast.
Cheap, stable, binary and non-toxic, with a band gap close to ideal for single-junction cells – but solar efficiencies remain far behind CdTe and CIGS, and the open-circuit voltage is the gap. In photonics the case is stronger: Sb2Se3 and Sb2S3 switch with so little absorption that they make practical programmable waveguides, where the established phase-change alloys lose too much light.
The newest items tagged Sb2Se3, Sb2S3, from the news feed updated 5 Oct 2026.
Lead-free chalcogenide perovskites offer a nontoxic and thermally robust path beyond Pb-based perovskite solar cells (PSCs), but their device-level behavior in realistic three-dimensional geometries remains insufficiently characterized. In this work, we investigate ZnSe/MgXS3(X = Ti, Zr, Hf)/Sb2S3 solar cell…
Photonic topological insulators (PTIs) offer robust platforms for light manipulation, but reconfigurable control of their topological properties without degrading performance remains a major challenge. While phase-change materials (PCMs) provide large refractive index modulation, widely used materials such as Ge2Sb2Te5…
Integrated and tunable light sources are critical for advancing quantum nanophotonic chips in quantum computing, communications, and sensing. However, efficient and tunable emission amplification post-fabrication poses major challenges. Hybrid metasurfaces combining niobium pentoxide (Nb2O5), copper indium sulfide…
Chalcogenide-based optical phase change materials (OPCMs) exhibit a large contrast in refractive index when reversibly switched between their stable amorphous and crystalline states. OPCMs have rapidly gained attention due to their versatility as nonvolatile amplitude or phase modulators in various photonic devices.…
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