The possible current-conduction mechanism in the Au/ (CoSO 4 -PVP)/n-Si junctions Hasan Elamen 1 , Yosef Badali 2, * , Muhammet Tahir Gu ¨nes ¸ er 1 , and S ¸ emsettin Altındal 3 1 Department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Karabük University, Karabük, Turkey 2 Department of Electrical & Electronics Engineering, Antalya Bilim University, Antalya, Turkey 3 Department of Physics, Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey Received: 3 August 2020 Accepted: 2 September 2020 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 ABSTRACT The possible current-conduction mechanism (CCMs) of the Au/CoSO 4 -PVP/n- Si junctions was investigated using temperature-dependence current–voltage (I– V) experiments over 100–360 K. The experimental results showed that the value of BH increases approximately linearly with increasing temperature. Such positive temperature coefficient (a = DU B0 /DT) is in agreement with the repor- ted negative temperature coefficient of the bandgap of Si (= - 0.473 meV/K). The (n ap -1 -1) vs q/2kT curves have different characters in two temperature ranges due to having separate two barrier distributions. The q 2 and q 3 values obtained from intercept and slope of these curves as 0.521 V and 0.011 V for 240–360 K temperature range and 0.737 V and 0.004 V for the 100–220 K range. This results show that the high temperature region with smaller q 2 and larger q 3 voltage deformation coefficients has a wider and greater of the barrier height distribution than the second region. As an evidence for the Gaussian distribu- tion, the U B0 and standard deviation (r 0 ) were derived from the intercept and slope of the U B0 -q/2kT curves as 1.14 eV and 0.163 V at high temperatures and 0.62 eV and 0.088 V at low temperatures. The Richardson constant obtained as 102 A/cm 2 K 2 for 240–360 K temperature range using standard deviation value which is similar to the theoretical Richardson constant value of silicon (112 A/cm 2 K 2 ). For each temperature, the profile of N ss vs (E c –E ss ) was provided using the voltage-dependent effective barrier height (U e ) value. It was observed that these surface conditions decreased with increasing temperature. Address correspondence to E-mail: bedeli.yusuf@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.1007/s10854-020-04406-3 J Mater Sci: Mater Electron