Intensity Modulated Photoluminescence Spectroscopy for Stable Perovskite Solar Cells

Objective

The solar cell industry already has an annual value of 200 billion US dollars and is expected to triple in the coming ten years. Within that period, an emerging solar cell material – halide perovskite – is projected to capture 20% of the market, by being used in combination with current market-leading silicon solar cells. While the efficiency of this emerging solar material is outstanding, ionic migration that occurs during solar cell operation leads to poor stability, which is the main factor limiting commercialization today. The current state-of-the-art techniques for measuring ionic migration require electrical contacts, cannot be used during the manufacturing process to understand which steps lead to instability, cannot be used for spatial mapping and provide no chemical information about the migrating ionic species. This means that such tools have limited utility in understanding and solving the stability problem. We have developed a purely optical technique for measuring ionic, chemical and defect processes in halide perovskite semiconductors – intensity modulated photoluminescence spectroscopy (IMPLS) – which overcomes all the limitations associated with state-of-the-art measurements. The goal of this ERC PoC project is to benchmark IMPLS against state-of-the-art techniques for measuring ion migration in halide perovskite materials and build prototypes of instruments that meet the market demand for understanding and solving the stability problem in halide perovskites. This will be done first in the research market, setting the stage for entering the much bigger development and manufacturing markets in the future.