Revealing the ground‐state geometry, optoelectronic, mechanical and thermodynamic behaviors, and efficiency of formamidinium mixed halide perovskites for solar cell applications

Abstract

Hybrid organic-inorganic lead halide perovskites are the revolutionary materials that have brought a new era of low-cost and highly efficient solar cells. Generally, high-performing perovskite solar cells incorporate formamidinium-based lead halide perovskites. Using density functional theory, we employed generalized gradient approximation (GGA) and meta-GGA (MGGA) exchange-correlation functionals to investigate the structural, electronic, optical, mechanical, and thermodynamic properties of the perovskite series FAPbI3, FAPbBr2I, FAPbBrI2, and FAPbBr3. Both the functionals successfully determined the most stable structure for each mixed halide perovskite. Electronic properties such as band structure, the density of states, and effective masses have been calculated and discussed. Our estimated band gap values using MGGA functional are more close to the experiments than PBE. Optical properties of the perovskite series such as dielectric function, complex refractive index, absorption coefficient, and reflectivity have been explained in the light of photovoltaic applications. Moreover, we predicted the maximum absorber efficiency via the spectroscopic limited maximum efficiency method. FAPbI3 achieved the highest efficiency by virtue of its suitable band gap and maximum absorption. Mechanical properties have also been studied through elastic constants, elastic moduli, Pugh ratio, Poisson ratio, and other several properties, which reveal the declining flexibility of perovskites with bromine. Further, thermodynamic properties like heat capacity, Debye temperature, vibrational internal energy, vibrational entropy, thermal expansion, and thermal stability have been discussed and analyzed. Among all perovskites, the thermodynamic stability of FAPbBr2I is found superior due to strong Br-I bonds and the tougher attraction of the ionic system in the perovskite lattice. All the results are compared with earlier reported values and found to be in fair agreement.