Abstract

Zinc oxide (ZnO) was traditional cathode material for solar cells due to excellent photoelectric properties. However, when ZnO is used as electron transport layers (ETLs) in perovskite solar cells (PSCs), the occurred deprotonation reactions can easily lead to the decomposition of perovskite layer. Herein, we reported a simple and controllable low-temperature strategy to overcome above problem for achieving high-efficient and stable ZnO based planar PSCs, i.e. the colloidal PbS QDs and tetrabutylammonium iodide (TBAI) was sequentially spin-coated on ZnO ETLs and then mild post-annealing process was carried out to obtaining ZnO/PbS-TBAI compact layer. Due to the iodine ligands from TBAI, the PbS-TBAI films act as both surface wetting control layer and electric dipole layer to adjust the crystal growth of perovskite films and charge behavior within devices. The better non-wetting surface of ZnO/PbS-TBAI ETLs improves the crystallization of the perovskite films by suppressing heterogeneous nucleation. And the unique energy level alignment of ZnO/PbS-TBAI induced by tunable surface dipole moment of TBAI boosted hetero-interface charge extraction of PSCs. Consequently, the optimized ZnO/PbS-TBAI based PSCs exhibits the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 20.53 %, which is the champion PCE of ZnO PSCs with MAPbI3 as the absorption layer. Stability tests also proved that the PCE of ZnO/PbS-TBAI based PSCs remains more than 86 % after exposure to 40 % humidity for 30 days, which is much more superior to that of control device. We firstly used iodination PbS QD films in this work to achieve higher photovoltaic performance in ZnO based PSCs, which prompts the further application of QDs materials within optoelectronic devices.

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