The stability and toxicity problems have haunted the development and applications of metal halide perovskite materials, for which the lead-free inorganic double perovskite Cs2AgBiBr6 has emerged as a promising substitute in recent years. However, poor film quality has severely limited its photovoltaic performance that could have been induced by some key factors such as high annealing temperature. Herein, we present a facile strategy to fabricate high-quality pinhole-free Cs2AgBiBr6 films with large grain sizes by introducing carbohydrazide (CBH) into the precursor. Detailed characterizations have shown that the carbonyl group (C═O) in CBH plays the critical role in coordinating with Ag+ and Bi3+ cations during the film formation process. As another consequence, the as-fabricated devices have exhibited significantly higher reproducibility for fabrication. By optimizing the amount of CBH, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) relatively increased 37 to 1.57%, which remained 95.0% in an ambient environment for a 1000-h test. Hopefully, this work could facilitate the current technologies in the exploration of high-performance lead-free perovskites such as Cs2AgBiBr6 and better understanding of the mechanism in the additive engineering as well.
Keywords: Cs2AgBiBr6; carbonyl activated formation; defect engineering; double perovskite; photovoltaics.