Interfacial Enhancement of Photovoltaic Performance in MAPbI₃/CsPbI₃ Superlattice

Perovskite solar cells have continued to fascinate over the past decade due to fast increasing power conversion efficiency and very low fabrication cost but still suffered from poor stability. Interface engineering is evolved to be one of the most promising solutions to the instability problem. In this work, we perform a first-principles study on the MAPbI₃/CsPbI₃ interface system, aiming at clarifying the underlying mechanism of interfacial enhancement of solar cell performance. We devise the atomistic modeling of superlattices as increasing the number of included unit cells and carry out structural optimizations, revealing that the binding strength between the perovskite layers becomes stronger while the band gap decreases as the supercell size increases. Using enough large supercells of the interface system, we further estimate the formation energies of the interfacial vacancy defects and activation barriers for vacancy-mediated I atom migrations. Our calculations show the shallow transition states for most of the defects and the higher activation barriers for I atom migrations across the interface, providing an evidence of performance enhancement by the interface formation. By giving an insightful understanding of the MAPbI₃/CsPbI₃ heterojunction, this work definitely contributes to the design of interface systems for high-performance solar cells.