Light-activated photocurrent degradation and self-healing in perovskite solar cells

By Wanyi Nie, J. Blancon, A. Neukirch, K. Appavoo, H. Tsai, M. Chhowalla, M. A. Alam, M. Sfeir, C. Katan, J. Even and 4 more. Nature Communications, 2016

643 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Solution-processed organometallic perovskite solar cells have emerged as one of the most promising thin-film photovoltaic technology. However, a key challenge is their lack of stability over prolonged solar irradiation. Few studies have investigated the effect of light soaking on hybrid perovskites and have attributed the degradation in the optoelectronic properties to photochemical or field-assisted ion migration. Here we show that the slow photocurrent degradation in thin-film photovoltaic devices is due to the formation of light-activated meta-stable deep-level trap states. However, the devices can self-heal completely by resting them in the dark for <1 min or the degradation can be completely prevented by operating the devices at 0 °C. We investigate several physical mechanisms to explain the microscopic origin for the formation of these trap states, among which the creation of small polaronic states involving localized cooperative lattice strain and molecular orientations emerges as a credible microscopic mechanism requiring further detailed studies. Organometallic perovskite solar cells exhibit good efficiency but their photostability is still relatively poorly understood and controlled. Here the authors show that photo-degradation arises from the formation of light-activated meta-stable trap states, is reversible, and can be frozen at 0 °C.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf26e103e65f1e2180a56b74e8f482839c74687a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Polymers and Plastics

Citations in the corpus

Selective growth of layered perovskites for stable and efficient photovoltaics (2018, background): “One of the reasons of efficiency degradation in PSCs is attributed to unstable perovskite materials itself composed of small organic cations (A+), metal cations (B2+) and halide anions (X-), which form a three-dimensional (3D) crystal structure of ABX3 (4-6).”