Significant performance enhancement of all-inorganic CsPbBr3 perovskite solar cells enabled by Nb-doped SnO2 as effective electron transport layer

Abstract

All-inorganic CsPbBr3-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 (Jsc) of CsPbBr3-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, Jsc 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 SnO2 films as ETLs in the CsPbBr3-based PSCs have been deposited at room temperature by high target utilization sputtering (HiTUS). Through optimizing the Nb doping level alone, the Jsc 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 SnO2 with sputtered SnO2 with Nb doping was up to 39% increase in Jsc 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.