Photoactivated p-Doping of Organic Interlayer Enables Efficient Perovskite/Silicon Tandem Solar Cells

Abstract

Solution-processed organic semiconductor layers on rough surfaces tend to vary widely in thickness, significantly hindering charge extraction in relevant optoelectronic devices. Herein, we report the photoactivated p-doping of hole-transporting material (HTM) to enhance hole extraction for (textured) perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells, making the device performance less sensitive to the variation of hole transport layer thickness. We used the ionic compound 4-isopropyl-4′-methyldiphenyliodonium tetrakis(penta-fluorophenyl-borate) (DPITPFB) as a p-type dopant in poly(triaryl amine) (PTAA), which we used as the HTM. We observed that light soaking DPI-TPFB-doped PTAA shows approximately 22 times higher conductivity compared with an undoped PTAA film, which translated into an improved fill factor (FF) for tandem solar cells. Our tandem solar cells achieved an ∼80% FF and 27.8% efficiency and operated at their maximum power point for 200 h without loss of performance, in addition to retaining ∼83% of initial performance over a month of operation in an outdoor environment.