RESUMO
In conventional semiconductor solar cells, carriers are extracted at the band edges and the excess electronic energy (E*) is lost as heat. If E* is harvested, power conversion efficiency can be as high as twice the Shockley-Queisser limit. To date, materials suitable for hot carrier solar cells have not been found due to efficient electron/optical-phonon scattering in most semiconductors, but our recent experiments revealed long-lived hot carriers in single-crystal hybrid lead bromide perovskites. Here we turn to polycrystalline methylammonium lead iodide perovskite, which has emerged as the material for highly efficient solar cells. We observe energetic electrons with excess energy ⟨E*⟩ ≈ 0.25 eV above the conduction band minimum and with lifetime as long as â¼100 ps, which is 2-3 orders of magnitude longer than those in conventional semiconductors. The energetic carriers also give rise to hot fluorescence emission with pseudo-electronic temperatures as high as 1900 K. These findings point to a suppression of hot carrier scattering with optical phonons in methylammonium lead iodide perovskite. We address mechanistic origins of this suppression and, in particular, the correlation of this suppression with dynamic disorder. We discuss potential harvesting of energetic carriers for solar energy conversion.
RESUMO
Recent discoveries of highly efficient solar cells based on lead iodide perovskites have led to a surge in research activity on understanding photo carrier generation in these materials, but little is known about trap states that may be detrimental to solar cell performance. Here we provide direct evidence for hole traps on the surfaces of three-dimensional (3D) CH3NH3PbI3 perovskite thin films and excitonic traps below the optical gaps in these materials. The excitonic traps possess weak optical transition strengths, can be populated from the relaxation of above gap excitations, and become more significant as dimensionality decreases from 3D CH3NH3PbI3 to two-dimensional (2D) (C4H9NH3I)2(CH3NH3I)(n-1)(PbI2)(n) (n = 1, 2, 3) perovskites and, within the 2D family, as n decreases from 3 to 1. We also show that the density of excitonic traps in CH3NH3PbI3 perovskite thin films grown in the presence of chloride is at least one-order of magnitude lower than that grown in the absence of chloride, thus explaining a widely known mystery on the much better solar cell performance of the former. The trap states are likely caused by electron-phonon coupling and are enhanced at surfaces/interfaces where the perovskite crystal structure is most susceptible to deformation.
