Electronic structure of indium tin oxide/nanocrystalline TiO2 interfaces as used in dye-sensitized solar cell devices

Dye-sensitized solar cells are typically prepared under ambient conditions and contamination is inevitably introduced during the fabrication process. Hence, the electronic structure and charge injection properties of the indium tin oxide (ITO)/nanocrystalline titanium dioxide (TiO2) interface was studied by photoemission spectroscopy (PES) in the presence of environmental contaminants. The interface was formed by in situ multi-step electrospray thin film deposition of TiO2 nanoparticles onto ITO substrates cleaned prior in solvent under ambient conditions. In between deposition steps, the samples were characterized with PES yielding the band line-up at the ITO/TiO2 interface. In addition, the band line-up before and after annealing of the TiO2 layer was determined. The results of these measurements have in common that there are only small charge injection barriers between the valence bands of the oxides (similar to 0-0.2 eV), but more significant barriers for electron injection from TiO2 to ITO (similar to 0.3-0.5 eV), which has the potential to affect the performance of solar cell device structures. Another focus of the experiments was to investigate whether an earlier reported work function lowering measurement artifact occurring during ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy (UPS) measurements on environmentally contaminated metal oxide surfaces would affect the characterization of ITO/TiO2 interfaces. For this purpose additional band line-up measurements using low intensity x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (LIXPS) were performed. LIXPS has been demonstrated to not cause the artifact, i.e., can be used to detect its occurrence. The results of these experiments show that the UV-induced work function reduction is not observed on the annealed interface, but that at contaminated interfaces care must be taken during data evaluation to take the artifact into account. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3596544]