Microwave seminar | 29 November 2021

Lead halide perovskites show a great potential for the modern PV technology due to their unique physical properties such as direct and chemically tunable band gap, high absorption coefficient, defect tolerance, high carrier mobility and long carrier diffusion length. Besides, the fabrication of perovskite solar cells (PSC) is cheap and simple, and uses mostly chemical methods. Despite that, the experimentally achieved PSC performance is still far from the theoretical efficiency limit, which is the result of charge recombination and insufficient light management that potentially can be solved by integration of nanophotonic structures.
To solve this problem, we have decided to improve the optical properties of a mesoporous electron transport TiO2 layer (ETL) commonly used in PSCs by inclusion of Mie-resonant silicon nanoparticles (NPs). These nanoobjects can efficiently enhance and scatter the incident light, and the average distance between the nanoparticles defines the scattering radiation pattern created by the interaction of electric and magnetic multipoles. The provided numerical calculations show that the concentration of incident light in perovskite layer reaches maximum when the average distance between the Mie-resonant NPs is comparable with their size. Moreover, NPs located in the ETL prevent parasitic charge recombination by the integrated material. The presented multi-physical calculations are in a good agreement with experimental characteristics of the PV devices.
Besides the expected enhancement of photoluminescence signal, the efficiency of n-i-p MAPbI3-based PSCs with a Mie-resonant ETL show a certified performance of 21.1%, while the bare cells have achieved only 18% in literature, and the external quantum efficiency is increased in the whole MAPbI3 operation range.
The proposed simple method of PSCs improvement can be easily adopted for other approaches of cell fabrication (slot-die, blade-coating, etc.), and even for upscaling techniques.

Main paper/arXiv, related to the seminar, and other references

1. A.D. Furasova, E. Calabro, E. Lamanna, E.Y. Tiguntseva, E.V. Ushakova, E.V. Ubyivovk, V.Y. Mikhailovskii, A.A. Zakhidov, S.V. Makarov, A.D. Di Carlo //Resonant Silicon Nanoparticles for Enhanced Light Harvesting in Halide Perovskite Solar Cells // Advanced Optical Materials. - 2018. - Vol. 21 https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201800576
2. S.V. Makarov, A.D. Furasova, E.Y. Tiguntseva, A. Hemmetter, A.S. Berestennikov, A.P. Pushkarev, A.A. Zakhidov, Y.A. Kivshar //Halide-Perovskite Resonant Nanophotonics // Advanced Optical Materials. - 2019. - Vol. 7 //doi.org/10.1002/adom.201800784
3. A.D. Furasova, E. Lamanna, E. Colabro, S.V. Makarov, A. Di Carlo //Perovskite solar cell improvement by gold nanoparticles prepared by laser ablation in liquid // Journal of Physics: Conference Series. - 2020. - Vol. 1461. - № 1. - Pp. 012043 doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1461/1/012043
4. A.D. Furasova, P.M. Voroshilov, E. Lamanna, S.V. Makarov, A. Mozharov, A.N. Tsypkin, I.S. Mukhin, D. Barettin, K.S. Ladutenko, A.A. Zakhidov, A. Di Carlo// Engineering the Charge Transport Properties of Resonant Silicon Nanoparticles in Perovskite Solar Cells // Energy Technology. - 2020. - Vol. 8. - № 4. - Pp. 1900877 doi.org/10.1002/ente.201900877
5. Aleksandra Furasova, Pavel Voroshilov, Mikhail Baranov, Pavel Tonkaev, Anna Nikolaeva, Kirill Voronin, Luigi Vesce, Sergey Makarov, Aldo Di Carlo. Mie-resonant mesoporous electron transport layer for highly efficient perovskite solar cells //Nano Energy. – 2021. – V. 89 (B). – P.106484