Exploiting Electrical Transients to Quantify Charge Loss in Solar Cells

Electrical transients enabled by an optical excitation and an electric detection provide a distinctive opportunity to study charge transport, recombination, and even photoelectric hysteresis of a solar cell in a wide time window ranging from nanoseconds to seconds. However, controversies on how to exploit these investigations to unravel the charge loss mechanism of the cell have been ongoing. Herein, a new methodology of quantifying the charge loss within the bulk absorber or at the interfaces and the defect properties of solar cells has been proposed. This methodology has been successfully applied in the study of commercialized silicon and emerging Cu2ZnSn(S, Se)(4) and perovskite solar cells herein and should also be applicable to other similar photovoltaic device systems. Overall, this work provides an alluring route for a comprehensive investigation of dynamic physics processes and charge loss mechanism of solar cells and possesses potential applications for other optoelectronic devices.