Impermeable Atomic Layer Deposition for Sputtering Buffer Layer in Efficient Semi-Transparent and Tandem Solar Cells via Activating Unreactive Substrate

Abstract

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) turns out to be particularly attractive technology for the sputtering buffer layer when preparing the semi-transparent (ST) perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and the tandem solar cells. ALD process turns to be island growth when the substrate is unreactive with the ALD reactants, resulting in the pin-hole layer, which causes an adverse effect on anti-sputtering. Here, p-i-n structured PSCs with ALD SnO_x as sputtering buffer layer are conducted. The commonly used electron transportation layer (ETL) PCBM in the p-i-n structured PVK solar cell is an unreactive substrate that prevents the layer-by-layer growth for the ALD SnO_x . PCBM layer is activated by introducing reaction sites to form impermeable ALD layers. By introducing reaction sites/ALD SnO_x as sputtering buffer layer, the authors succeed to fabricate ST-PSCs and perovskite/silicon (double-side polished) tandem solar cells with power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 20.25% and 23.31%, respectively. Besides, the unencapsulated device with reaction sites maintains more than 99% of the initial PCE after aging over 5100 h. This work opens a promising avenue to prepare impermeable layer for stable PSCs, ST-PSCs, tandem solar cells, and the related scale-up solar cells.

Keywords: atomic deposition layer; buffer layer; perovskite solar cell; semi-transparent solar cell; tandem solar cell.