Significant performance enhancement of all‐inorganic CsPbBr<sub>3</sub> perovskite solar cells enabled by Nb‐doped SnO<sub>2</sub> as effective electron transport layer
Ruxin Guo, Yan Zhao, Yongshang Zhang, Quanrong Deng, Yonglong Shen, Wei Zhang, Guosheng Shao
Abstract
All‐inorganic CsPbBr 3 ‐based perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have attracted great attention because of their high chemical and thermal stabilities in ambient air. However, the short‐circuit current density ( J sc ) of CsPbBr 3 ‐based PSCs is inadequate under solar illumination because of the wide bandgap, inefficient charge extraction and recombination loss, leading to lower power‐conversion efficiencies (PCEs). It is envisaged that in addition to narrowing the bandgap by alloying, J sc of the PSCs could be enhanced by effective improvement of electron transportation, suppression of charge recombination at the interface between the perovskite and electron transporting layer (ETL), and tuning of the space charge field in the device. In this work, Nb‐doped SnO 2 films as ETLs in the CsPbBr 3 ‐based PSCs have been deposited at room temperature by high target utilization sputtering (HiTUS). Through optimizing the Nb doping level alone, the J sc was increased by nearly 19%, from 7.51 to 8.92 mA·cm −2 and the PCE was enhanced by 27% from 6.73% to 8.54%. The overall benefit by replacing the spin‐coated SnO 2 with sputtered SnO 2 with Nb doping was up to 39% increase in J sc and 62% increase in PCE. Moreover, the PCE of the optimized device showed negligible degradation over exposure to ambient environment (T ˜ 25 °C, RH˜45%), with 95.4% of the original PCE being maintained after storing the device for 1200 h.