Self-Assembled Monolayers for Perovskite Solar Cells

Abstract

Perovskite solar cells have gone through tremendous improvements the past years. Record efficiencies are approaching those of crystalline Si solar cell technology, but on other aspects many improvements can still be made. For commercialization, its stability is the main point of concern,while from fundamental perspective the issue of hysteresis is highly interesting. With more and more developments being made on the bulk structures, the interfaces are gaining interest, as these are now bottlenecks for further developments.Here, two different surface modifications have been investigated. Firstly, the surface of SnO2 was modified using a molecule with a permanent dipole moment in attempt to improve charge extraction from the absorber layer into the electron transport material. Secondly, functionalization of the surface of fluorine-doped tin oxide was attempted using a redox-active species. In this case,the idea was to create a selective contact based on a monolayer of the redox-active molecule. For both molecules, assessment of the presence of the monolayer was proven to be difficult. With respect to control samples, no improvements in solar cell performance have been achieved.