Doped spiro-OMeTAD at present is the most commonly used hole transport material (HTM) in n-i-p-type perovskite solar cells, enabling high efficiencies around 22%. However, the required dopants were shown to induce nonradiative recombination of charge carriers and foster degradation of the solar cell. Here, in a novel approach, highly conductive and inexpensive water-free poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) is used to replace these dopants. The resulting spiro-OMeTAD/PEDOT (SpiDOT) mixed films achieve higher lateral conductivities than layers of doped spiro-OMeTAD. Furthermore, combined transient and steady-state photoluminescence studies reveal a passivating effect of PEDOT, suppressing nonradiative recombination losses at the perovskite/HTM interface. This enables excellent quasi-Fermi level splitting values of up to 1.24 eV in perovskite/SpiDOT layer stacks and high open-circuit voltages ( VOC) up to 1.19 V in complete solar cells. Increasing the amount of dopant-free spiro-OMeTAD in SpiDOT layers is shown to enhance hole extraction and thereby improves the fill factor in solar cells. As a consequence, stabilized efficiencies up to 18.7% are realized, exceeding cells with doped spiro-OMeTAD as a HTM in this study. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, these results mark the lowest nonradiative recombination loss in the VOC (140 mV with respect to the Shockley-Queisser limit) and highest efficiency reported so far for perovskite solar cells using PEDOT as a HTM.
Keywords: PEDOT; passivation; perovskite solar cell; quasi-Fermi level splitting; recombination; selective contact; spiro-OMeTAD.