Organic-Inorganic Perovskite Films and Efficient Planar Heterojunction Solar Cells by Magnetron Sputtering

Organic-inorganic halide perovskites have been widely used in photovoltaic technologies. Despite tremendous progress in their efficiency and stability, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are still facing the challenges of upscaling and stability for practical applications. As a mature film preparation technology, magnetron sputtering has been widely used to prepare metals, metallic oxides, and some semiconductor films, which has great application potential in the fabrication of PSCs. Here, a unique technology where high-quality perovskite films are prepared via magnetron sputtering for controllable composition, solvent-free, large-area, and massive production, is presented. This strategy transforms the perovskite materials from powder to thin films by magnetron sputtering and post-treatment (vapor-assisted treatment with methanaminium iodide gas and methylamine gas treatment), which is greatly favorable to manufacture tandem solar cells. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of PSCs with perovskite films fabricated by magnetron sputtering is 6.14%. After optimization, high-performance perovskite films with excellent electronic properties are obtained and stable PSCs with excellent reproducibility are realized, showing a PCE of up to 15.22%. The entirely novel synthetic approach opens up a new and promising way to achieve high-throughput magnetron sputtering for large-area production in commercial applications of planar heterojunction and tandem PSCs.