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Two dimensional/three‐dimensional (2D/3D) metal halide perovskite heterostructures have attracted great interest in photovoltaic and light‐emitting diode (LEDs) applications. In both, their implementation results in an improvement in device efficiency yet the understanding of these heterostructures remains incomplete. In this work the role of organic cations, essential for the formation of 2D perovskite structures is unraveled, in a range of metal halide perovskite heterostructures. These heterostructures are used to fabricate efficient green perovskite LEDs and a strong dependence between cation content and device performance is shown. The crystal structure, charge‐carrier transport and dynamics, and the electronic structure of these heterostructures are studied and it is shown that the presence of crystalline 2D perovskite inhibits electron injection and ultimately lowers device performance. This work highlights the importance of optimizing the composition of these heterostructures in ensuring optimal device performance across all parameters and suggests that developing routes to inject charge‐carriers directly into 2D perovskite structures will be important in ensuring the continued development of perovskite LEDs based on these heterostructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metal‐halide perovskites have proven to be a versatile group of semiconductors for optoelectronic applications, with ease of bandgap tuning and stability improvements enabled by halide and cation mixing. However, such compositional variations can be accompanied by significant changes in their charge‐carrier transport and recombination regimes that are still not fully understood. Here, a novel combinatorial technique is presented to disentangle such dynamic processes over a wide range of temperatures, based on transient free‐space, high‐frequency microwave conductivity and photoluminescence measurements conducted simultaneously in situ. Such measurements are used to reveal and contrast the dominant charge‐carrier recombination pathways for a range of key compositions: prototypical methylammonium lead iodide perovskite (MAPbI3), the stable mixed formamidinium‐caesium lead‐halide perovskite FA0.83Cs0.17PbBr0.6I2.4 targeted for photovoltaic tandems with silicon, and fully inorganic wide‐bandgap CsPbBr3 aimed toward light sources and X‐ray detector applications. The changes in charge‐carrier dynamics in FA0.83Cs0.17PbBr0.6I2.4 across temperatures are shown to be dominated by radiative processes, while those in MAPbI3 are governed by energetic disorder at low temperatures, low‐bandgap minority‐phase inclusions around the phase transition, and non‐radiative processes at room temperature. In contrast, CsPbBr3 exhibits significant charge‐carrier trapping at low and high temperatures, highlighting the need for improvement of material processing techniques for wide‐bandgap perovskites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed lead‐tin (Pb:Sn) halide perovskites are promising absorbers with narrow‐bandgaps (1.25–1.4 eV) suitable for high‐efficiency all‐perovskite tandem solar cells. However, solution processing of optimally thick Pb:Sn perovskite films is notoriously difficult in comparison with their neat‐Pb counterparts. This is partly due to the rapid crystallization of Sn‐based perovskites, resulting in films that have a high degree of roughness. Rougher films are harder to coat conformally with subsequent layers using solution‐based processing techniques leading to contact between the absorber and the top metal electrode in completed devices, resulting in a loss of VOC, fill factor, efficiency, and stability. Herein, this study employs a non‐continuous layer of alumina nanoparticles distributed on the surface of rough Pb:Sn perovskite films. Using this approach, the conformality of the subsequent electron‐transport layer, which is only tens of nanometres in thickness is improved. The overall maximum‐power‐point‐tracked efficiency improves by 65% and the steady‐state VOC improves by 28%. Application of the alumina nanoparticles as an interfacial buffer layer also results in highly reproducible Pb:Sn solar cell devices while simultaneously improving device stability at 65 °C under full spectrum simulated solar irradiance. Aged devices show a six‐fold improvement in stability over pristine Pb:Sn devices, increasing their lifetime to 120 h. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silver‐bismuth based semiconductors represent a promising new class of materials for optoelectronic applications because of their high stability, all‐inorganic composition, and advantageous optoelectronic properties. In this study, charge‐carrier dynamics and transport properties are investigated across five compositions along the AgBiI4–CuI solid solution line (stoichiometry Cu4x(AgBi)1−xI4). The presence of a close‐packed iodide sublattice is found to provide a good backbone for general semiconducting properties across all of these materials, whose optoelectronic properties are found to improve markedly with increasing copper content, which enhances photoluminescence intensity and charge‐carrier transport. Photoluminescence and photoexcitation‐energy‐dependent terahertz photoconductivity measurements reveal that this enhanced charge‐carrier transport derives from reduced cation disorder and improved electronic connectivity owing to the presence of Cu+. Further, increased Cu+ content enhances the band curvature around the valence band maximum, resulting in lower charge‐carrier effective masses, reduced exciton binding energies, and higher mobilities. Finally, ultrafast charge‐carrier localization is observed upon pulsed photoexcitation across all compositions investigated, lowering the charge‐carrier mobility and leading to Langevin‐like bimolecular recombination. This process is concluded to be intrinsically linked to the presence of silver and bismuth, and strategies to tailor or mitigate the effect are proposed and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metal‐halide perovskites (MHP) are highly promising semiconductors for light‐emitting and photovoltaic applications. The colloidal synthesis of nanocrystals (NCs) is an effective approach for obtaining nearly defect‐free MHP that can be processed into inks for low‐cost, high‐performance device fabrication. However, disentangling the effects of surface ligands, morphology, and boundaries on charge‐carrier transport in thin films fabricated with these high‐quality NCs is inherently difficult. To overcome this fundamental challenge, terahertz (THz) spectroscopy is employed to optically probe the photoconductivity of CsPbBr3 NC films. The vibrational and optoelectronic properties of the NCs are compared with those of the corresponding bulk polycrystalline perovskite and significant deviations are found. Charge‐carrier mobilities and recombination rates are demonstrated to vary significantly with the NC size. Such dependences derive from the localized nature of charge carriers within NCs, with local mobilities dominating over interparticle transport. It is further shown that the colloidally synthesized NCs have distinct vibrational properties with respect to the bulk perovskite, exhibiting blue‐shifted optical phonon modes with enhanced THz absorption strength that also manifest as strong modulations in the THz photoconductivity spectra. Such fundamental insights into NC versus bulk properties will guide the optimization of nanocrystalline perovskite thin films for optoelectronic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The photoluminescence, transmittance, charge-carrier recombination dynamics, mobility, and diffusion length of CH3NH3PbI3 are investigated in the temperature range from 8 to 370 K. Profound changes in the optoelectronic properties of this prototypical photovoltaic material are observed across the two structural phase transitions occurring at 160 and 310 K. Drude-like terahertz photoconductivity spectra at all temperatures above 80 K suggest that charge localization effects are absent in this range. The monomolecular charge-carrier recombination rate generally increases with rising temperature, indicating a mechanism dominated by ionized impurity mediated recombination. Deduced activation energies Ea associated with ionization are found to increase markedly from the room-temperature tetragonal ( Ea ≈ 20 meV) to the higher-temperature cubic ( Ea ≈ 200 meV) phase adopted above 310 K. Conversely, the bimolecular rate constant decreases with rising temperature as charge-carrier mobility declines, while the Auger rate constant is highly phase specific, suggesting a strong dependence on electronic band structure. The charge-carrier diffusion length gradually decreases with rising temperature from about 3 μm at −93 °C to 1.2 μm at 67 °C but remains well above the optical absorption depth in the visible spectrum. These results demonstrate that there are no fundamental obstacles to the operation of cells based on CH3NH3PbI3 under typical field conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells rely on effective infiltration of a solid-state hole-transporting material into the pores of a nanoporous TiO2 network to allow for dye regeneration and hole extraction. Using microsecond transient absorption spectroscopy and femtosecond photoluminescence upconversion spectroscopy, the hole-transfer yield from the dye to the hole-transporting material 2,2′,7,7′-tetrakis( N,N-di-p-methoxyphenylamine)-9,9'-spirobifluorene (spiro-OMeTAD) is shown to rise rapidly with higher pore-filling fractions as the dye-coated pore surface is increasingly covered with hole-transporting material. Once a pore-filling fraction of ≈30% is reached, further increases do not significantly change the hole-transfer yield. Using simple models of infiltration of spiro-OMeTAD into the TiO2 porous network, it is shown that this pore-filling fraction is less than the amount required to cover the dye surface with at least a single layer of hole-transporting material, suggesting that charge diffusion through the dye monolayer network precedes transfer to the hole-transporting material. Comparison of these results with device parameters shows that improvements of the power-conversion efficiency beyond ≈30% pore filling are not caused by a higher hole-transfer yield, but by a higher charge-collection efficiency, which is found to occur in steps. The observed sharp onsets in photocurrent and power-conversion efficiencies with increasing pore-filling fraction correlate well with percolation theory, predicting the points of cohesive pathway formation in successive spiro-OMeTAD layers adhered to the pore walls. From percolation theory it is predicted that, for standard mesoporous TiO2 with 20 nm pore size, the photocurrent should show no further improvement beyond an ≈83% pore-filling fraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]