The passivation quality at the interface between liquid‐phase crystallized silicon (LPC‐Si) and a dielectric interlayer (IL) was investigated in terms of the defect state density at the IL/LPC‐Si interface ( D it ) as well as the effective fixed charge density in the IL ( Q IL,eff ). Both parameters were obtained via high‐frequency capacitance–voltage measurements on developed metal–insulator–semiconductor structures based on a molybdenum layer sandwiched between the IL and the glass substrate. D it and Q IL,eff were correlated to the open circuit voltage ( V oc ) and the integrated external quantum efficiency ( J sc,EQE ) obtained on corresponding solar cell structures as well as to V oc and J sc,EQE results based on two‐dimensional simulations. We found that D it was reduced by one order of magnitude using a hydrogen plasma treatment (HPT) at 400 °C. Irrespectively of the HPT, Q IL,eff was > 10 12  cm −2 . We suggest that field‐effect passivation dominates chemical passivation at the IL/n‐type LPC‐Si interface. We attribute the significant enhancement of V oc and J sc,EQE observed after HPT on n‐type LPC‐Si solar cells mainly to improvements of the passivation quality in the n‐type LPC‐Si bulk rather than at the IL/n‐type LPC‐Si interface. For p‐type absorbers, the HPT did not improve V oc and J sc,EQE significantly. We propose that this is because of an insufficient passivation of bulk defects by positively charged hydrogen, which dominates in p‐type silicon, in combination with an insufficient interface passivation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. In the manuscript entitled “ Passivation at the interface between liquid‐phase crystallized silicon and silicon oxynitride in thin film solar cells ” by N. Preissler* , J. A. Töfflinger, O. Gabriel, P. Sonntag, D. Amkreutz, B. Stannowski, R. Schlatmann and B. Rech the improvement of the passivation quality at the interface liquid‐phase crystallized silicon (LPC‐Si)/interlayer interface through a high‐temperature hydrogen plasma treatment (HPT) is demonstrate. The improvement of solar cell parameters after HPT is suggested to be governed by an improved quality of the bulk of hydrogenated n‐type LPC‐Si but not for p‐type LPC‐Si.


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