Publication date: 15th December 2025
Solar cells have a great potential in replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation, if requirements of low production costs can be met. In the last years, lead halide perovskites have drastically changed the solar cell research field due to their ease of synthesis and high power conversion efficiencies, which now reach over 25%. The future success of these developments crucially depends on understanding the details charge separation, charge transport and charge recombination at the interfaces between the different layers in a solar cell as well as what parameters limit solar cell stability. X-ray based techniques such as photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) are powerful tools for obtaining electronic structure information of materials at an atomic level.
In this presentation, I will show how we have used photoelectron spectroscopy to gain insights into the interface between the perovskite, and the electron transport layers in a p-i-n structure (C60, BCP and silver). These studies are carried out by in-vacuum cleaving of perovskite single crystals and therefore obtaining a clean crystalline perovskite surfaces [1]. We then follow the details of band alignment of C60 on this surface through sequential evaporation of the electron transport material. We show that this interface is chemically stable but shows downwards band bending towards the perovskite, which is unfavourable for charge extraction in the solar cell. This band bending can be counteracted upon addition of BCP. However, upon evaporation of the back contact silver, we find that chemical reactions occur at the interface with perovskites ions migrating towards the silver contact.
