Band Alignment Engineering Towards High Efficiency Carbon-Based Inorganic Planar CsPbIBr₂ Perovskite Solar Cells

Perovskite CsPbIBr₂ is attracting ever-increasing attention for carbon-based, all-inorganic solar cells, owing to its well-balanced band gap and stability features. However, significant interfacial recombination of charge carriers in solar cells fabricated with this active layer, which is intrinsically associated with the unwanted conduction band misalignment between CsPbIBr₂ and the commonly used TiO₂ electron transport layer, has limited power conversion efficiency (PCE) values. Herein, we demonstrate successful conduction band alignment engineering at the TiO₂ /CsPbIBr₂ heterojunction by modifying TiO₂ with CsBr clusters. Such modification triggers a beneficial increase in the conduction band minimum (CBM) of TiO₂ from -4.00 to -3.81 eV and decreases the work function from 4.11 to 3.86 eV, thus promoting favorable band alignment at the heterojunction, suppressing recombination, and improving extraction and transport of charge carriers. As a result, the carbon-based, all-inorganic CsPbIBr₂ solar cells exhibit over 20 % enhancement in average PCE. The champion device achieves a PCE of 10.71 %, a record among pure CsPbIBr₂ -based cells, open-circuit voltage of 1.261 V, and excellent stability.