Inverted perovskite solar cells using dimethylacridine-based dopants

Qin Tan; Zhaoning Li; Guangfu Luo; Xusheng Zhang; Bo Che; Guocong Chen; Han Gao; Dong He; Guoqiang Ma; Jiafeng Wang; Jingwei Xiu; Huqiang Yi; Tao Chen; Zhubing He

doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06207-0

Inverted perovskite solar cells using dimethylacridine-based dopants

Nature. 2023 Aug;620(7974):545-551. doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06207-0. Epub 2023 May 24.

Authors

Qin Tan^#¹, Zhaoning Li^#¹, Guangfu Luo¹, Xusheng Zhang¹, Bo Che², Guocong Chen¹, Han Gao¹, Dong He¹, Guoqiang Ma¹, Jiafeng Wang¹, Jingwei Xiu¹, Huqiang Yi¹, Tao Chen², Zhubing He³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Institute of Innovative Materials, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Full Spectral Solar Electricity Generation, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China.
² Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Institute of Innovative Materials, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Full Spectral Solar Electricity Generation, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. hezb@sustech.edu.cn.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 37224876
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06207-0

Abstract

Doping of perovskite semiconductors¹ and passivation of their grain boundaries² remain challenging but essential for advancing high-efficiency perovskite solar cells. Particularly, it is crucial to build perovskite/indium tin oxide (ITO) Schottky contact based inverted devices without predepositing a layer of hole-transport material^3-5. Here we report a dimethylacridine-based molecular doping process used to construct a well-matched p-perovskite/ITO contact, along with all-round passivation of grain boundaries, achieving a certified power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 25.39%. The molecules are shown to be extruded from the precursor solution to the grain boundaries and the bottom of the film surface in the chlorobenzene-quenched crystallization process, which we call a molecule-extrusion process. The core coordination complex between the deprotonated phosphonic acid group of the molecule and lead polyiodide of perovskite is responsible for both mechanical absorption and electronic charge transfer, and leads to p-type doping of the perovskite film. We created an efficient device with a PCE of 25.86% (reverse scan) and that maintained 96.6% of initial PCE after 1,000 h of light soaking.