Anomalous photovoltaic effect in organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite solar cells

Yongbo Yuan, Tao Li, Qi Wang, Jie Xing, Alexei Gruverman, Jinsong Huang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

164 Scopus citations

Abstract

Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites (OIHPs) have been demonstrated to be highly successful photovoltaic materials yielding very-high-efficiency solar cells. We report the room temperature observation of an anomalous photovoltaic (APV) effect in lateral structure OIHP devices manifested by the device’s open-circuit voltage (VOC) that is much larger than the bandgap of OIHPs. The persistent VOC is proportional to the electrode spacing, resembling that of ferroelectric photovoltaic devices. However, the APV effect in OIHP devices is not caused by ferroelectricity. The APV effect can be explained by the formation of tunneling junctions randomly dispersed in the polycrystalline films, which allows the accumulation of photovoltage at a macroscopic level. The formation of internal tunneling junctions as a result of ion migration is visualized with Kelvin probe force microscopy scanning. This observation points out a new avenue for the formation of large and continuously tunable VOC without being limited by the materials’ bandgap.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere1602164
JournalScience Advances
Volume3
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2017
Externally publishedYes

Funding

We thank the financial support from NSF (ECCS-1252623 and DMR-1505535).

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