Strong covalency-induced recombination centers in perovskite solar cell material CH3NH3PbI3

Inorganic-organic hybrid perovskites are a new family of solar cell materials, which have recently been used to make solar cells with efficiency approaching 20%. Here, we report the unique defect chemistry of the prototype material, CH3NH3PbI3, based on first-principles calculation. We found that both the Pb cations and I anions in this material exhibit strong covalency as characterized by the formation of Pb dimers and I trimers with strong covalent bonds at some of the intrinsic defects. The Pb dimers and I trimers are only stabilized in a particular charge state with significantly lowered energy, which leads to deep charge-state transition levels within the band gap, in contradiction to a recent proposal that this system has only shallow intrinsic defects. Our results show that, in order to prevent the deep-level defects from being effective recombination centers, the equilibrium carrier concentrations should be controlled so that the Fermi energy is about 0.3 eV away from the band edges. Beyond this range, according to a Shockley-Read-Hall analysis, the non-equilibrium carrier lifetime will be strongly affected by the concentration of I vacancies and the anti-site defects with I occupying a CH3NH3 site.