Enhanced Charge Extraction in Metal–Perovskite–Metal Back-Contact Solar Cell Structure Through Electrostatic Doping: A Numerical Study

In conventional perovskite solar cells (PSCs), a thin active layer of perovskite is sandwiched between two charge transport layers (CTLs)-electron transport layer (ETL) and hole transport layer (HTL). CTLs help in extracting and navigating the photogenerated electron-hole (e-h) pairs to the respective electrodes. Although this phenomenon gives high-energy conversion efficiencies but leads to quite a few performances as well as fabrication challenges. The ways to partially overcome these challenges are to have a device without the need of having CTLs altogether and opting for the back-contact (BC) design for PSCs. Dipole fields (DFs) present at the metal perovskite interface may be thought for their possible utilization to have CTL-free BC PSC. However, the performance of such devices is limited by the difference between the metal work functions across the perovskite layer. In this article, we report the results for our studies to establish that an electrostatically doped DF-assisted metal perovskite metal back-contact (ED-DF-MPM) PSC structure has the ability to overcome the limitations of DF-assisted metal perovskite metal back-contact (DF-MPM) PSCs. As a part of the work carried out here, ED p-n-junction and corresponding built-in potential have been combined for DF-assisted extraction of generated carriers within the perovskite layer so as to enhance the collection probability and open-circuit voltage. Quantitively, 32.7%, 10.6%, and 8.6% improvement in short-circuit current density (J
_SC
), open-circuit voltage (V
_OC
), and fill factor (FF) are obtained, respectively, which resulted in an observation of 59.4% improvement in power conversion efficiency (PCE) for ED-DF-MPM PSC compared to DF-MPM PSC. Besides that, the reported ED-DF-MPM PSC structure delivers the photovoltage and photocurrent of 659 mV and 14.19 mA ·cm
^-2
, respectively. The work reported in this article may pave the way for the development of “transport layer-free” ED scalable and low-cost PSCs in future.