Ruthenium acetylacetonate in interface engineering for high performance planar hybrid perovskite solar cells

As it already made huge effect in the commercialization of silicon and other photovoltaics, interface engineering is dispensable in the current and future evolution of hybrid perovskite solar cells (PSCs) techniques. In order to solve carriers' recombination and detention at the cathode side of planar PSCs, in this work, Ruthenium acetylacetonate (RuAcac) was successfully adopted as a reliable and stable cathode interfacial layer (CIL) to improve the inverted planar PSCs. The power conversion efficiency of the optimal devices was enhanced from 12.74% for the control device without RuAcac, to 17.15% for the RuAcac based devices, with an open circuit voltage of 1.077 V, a short circuit current density of 21.28 mA/cm(2), and fill factor of 74.7% correspondingly. A series of photon-physics and microscopy protocols, including EQE, UPS, XPS, PL and SKPM, were used to discover the function of RuAcac CIL. Those results confirms an identical conclusion that RuAcac enables the formation of quasi-ohmic contact at the cathode side by eliminating the energy level barrier between the LUMO of PCBM and Fermi level of silver electrode. The low temperature and facile processed Ruthenium acetylacetonate in this work definitely offer us a robust interface-engineering way for the perovskite solar cells and also their commercialization. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America