Plasmon-induced trap filling at grain boundaries in perovskite solar cells

Kai Yao; Siqi Li; Zhiliang Liu; Yiran Ying; Petr Dvořák; Linfeng Fei; Tomáš Šikola; Haitao Huang; Peter Nordlander; Alex K-Y Jen; Dangyuan Lei

doi:10.1038/s41377-021-00662-y

Plasmon-induced trap filling at grain boundaries in perovskite solar cells

Light Sci Appl. 2021 Oct 28;10(1):219. doi: 10.1038/s41377-021-00662-y.

Authors

Kai Yao^#^{1

2}, Siqi Li^#^{3

4}, Zhiliang Liu⁵, Yiran Ying³, Petr Dvořák^{3

6}, Linfeng Fei^{5

3}, Tomáš Šikola⁶, Haitao Huang⁷, Peter Nordlander⁸, Alex K-Y Jen⁴, Dangyuan Lei⁹

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Photovoltaics/Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanchang University, Nanchang, 330031, China. yaokai@ncu.edu.cn.
² Department of Applied Physics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. yaokai@ncu.edu.cn.
³ Department of Applied Physics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.
⁴ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.
⁵ Institute of Photovoltaics/Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanchang University, Nanchang, 330031, China.
⁶ Institute of Physical Engineering, Brno University of Technology, Technická 2, Brno, 616 69, Czech Republic.
⁷ Department of Applied Physics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. aphhuang@polyu.edu.hk.
⁸ Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, Texas, 77005, USA.
⁹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. dangylei@cityu.edu.hk.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The deep-level traps induced by charged defects at the grain boundaries (GBs) of polycrystalline organic-inorganic halide perovskite (OIHP) films serve as major recombination centres, which limit the device performance. Herein, we incorporate specially designed poly(3-aminothiophenol)-coated gold (Au@PAT) nanoparticles into the perovskite absorber, in order to examine the influence of plasmonic resonance on carrier dynamics in perovskite solar cells. Local changes in the photophysical properties of the OIHP films reveal that plasmon excitation could fill trap sites at the GB region through photo-brightening, whereas transient absorption spectroscopy and density functional theory calculations correlate this photo-brightening of trap states with plasmon-induced interfacial processes. As a result, the device achieved the best efficiency of 22.0% with robust operational stability. Our work provides unambiguous evidence for plasmon-induced trap occupation in OIHP and reveals that plasmonic nanostructures may be one type of efficient additives to overcome the recombination losses in perovskite solar cells and thin-film solar cells in general.

Abstract

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