Halide Perovskites for Selective Ultraviolet-Harvesting Transparent Photovoltaics

Abstract

Summary Halide perovskite materials have emerged as a potential Si replacement with excellent photovoltaic properties. There has been growing interest in applying halide perovskites to semitransparent and spatially segmented transparent photovoltaics (TPVs) to enable a greater range of deployment routes. However, the continuous-band absorption of these semiconductors prevents near-infrared selective harvesting typically targeted for TPVs with the highest efficiency and transparency needed to meet the aesthetic demands of many potential applications. In this work, we demonstrate TPVs based on perovskite semiconductors where the band gap is sensitively tuned with a range of compositions to selectively harvest only ultraviolet photons with band gaps between 410 and 440 nm. This approach offers theoretical efficiencies up to 7% with >99% visible transparency when precisely targeting band gaps around 435 nm. Practical optimization of these perovskite cells could quickly yield TPVs with power conversion efficiencies rivaling state-of-the-art near-infrared harvesting TPVs today while also providing a route to higher-efficiency multi-junction TPVs.