Stabilizing perovskite solar cells with modified indium oxide electron transport layer

Abstract

Despite the impressive progress, the perovskite solar cells are still under the stage of laboratory research, mainly because of their inferior operational stability. To improve the device lifetime, one of the most important strategies is to eliminate the undesirable side reactions between the functional layers. In this study, we present the thermal oxidation method to yield high-quality pristine and modified indium oxide films applied as efficient electron transport layers (ETLs) for perovskite cells in a planar n-i-p configuration. The cells incorporating In2O3 as ETL material can deliver comparable efficiencies with the reference SnO2- based devices while showing much superior operational stability. We attributed the observed stabilizing effect of indium oxide to its reduced chemical activity at the interface with the perovskite absorber layer. In particular, In2O3 can hardly oxidize I- to molecular iodine on the contrary to SnO2 and TiO2 known for their photocatalytic activity. We believe that this study may provide researchers with general guidelines to develop a large variety of ETL materials for efficient yet stable perovskite cells.