Publication date: 21st July 2025
The dual electronic-ionic nature of perovskite solar cells has complicated the interpretation of almost all the standard PV characterisation techniques. For example, when ions move on the timescale of current-voltage measurements, they can act to modify carrier recombination rates and carrier extraction, influencing the shape of the response. Ions can also modify fast measurements, where the ‘frozen in’ ion distribution impacts the electronic response of the device. On the flip side, the ions can act as probes, giving us useful information about how well a cell is operating.
One technique we have used is impedance spectroscopy, a very common characterisation technique. The Nyquist plots measured for PSCs show a wide variety of different shapes, and many different interpretations of these spectra can be found in the literature. We recently showed that all of these experimentally observed shapes can be reproduced by a standard three layer drift diffusion model with a single mobile ion species, without the need to invoke any exotic physics within the device. The low frequency regime contains a wealth of information about the internal workings of the cell that can be obtained purely from shape recognition of the Nyquist plot, without any modelling expertise. This presentation will cover our recent work measuring and modelling a wide variety of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and using ion migration to diagnose device physics.