Kompetenzzentrum für Mikro- und Nanotechnologien

One of the most significant impediments to the upscaling of hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite (HOIP) solar cells is poor stability. So, to effectively establish precautionary strategies, it is necessary to have a comprehensive grasp of the mechanisms that contribute to their degradation. Conventional characterization techniques used for in situ degradation assessment of perovskite solar cells either track just universal parameters, which yields poor insights about localized degradation processes, or the technique itself induces degradation, which may confound results. Developed in this study is a nondestructive technique of analyzing in situ active layer degradation in HOIP solar cells’ active layer utilizing a combination of optical modelling and ageing device’s reflectance tracking. The optical dielectric functions of the solar cell’s functional layers were modelled using the layers’ transmitted and reflected light spectra. The transfer matrix approach was used to fit the reflectance spectrum of entire solar cell layer stacks utilizing the computed dielectric functions for individual materials and accounting for the possibility of lead iodide gradient layer formation in the model. Leveraging no other characterization method, the presence of a lead iodide gradient layer was identified within the solar cell layer stack, an unmistakable indicator of methyl ammonium lead iodide perovskite (MAPI) degradation, probing with only photons.