A low cost spin coating route of fabricating CuInS2 polycrystalline thin films by reactive sintering method was put forward. The ink for spin coating was optimized by pre-reducing the precursor powders in hydrogen, which turned the nanoparticle precursor powders from mixed sulfides into a mixture of CuInS2 and Cu-In metal alloys. The results of scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and Raman spectra showed that this optimization could highly improve the performance of CuInS2 polycrystalline thin films, including higher packing density, less impurity phases, and better quality. The energy gap of optimized CuInS2 thin film was determined to be about 1.45 eV by absorption spectroscopy measurement.
