Applications of vacuum vapor deposition for perovskite solar cells: A progress review

Metal halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have made substantial progress in power conversion efficiency (PCE) and stability in the past decade thanks to the advancements in perovskite deposition methodology, charge transport layer (CTL) optimization, and encapsulation technology. Solution-based methods have been intensively investigated and a 25.7% certified efficiency has been achieved. Vacuum vapor deposition protocols were less studied, but have nevertheless received increasing attention from industry and academia due to the great potential for large-area module fabrication, facile integration with tandem solar cell architectures, and compatibility with industrial manufacturing approaches. In this article, we systematically discuss the applications of several promising vacuum vapor deposition techniques, namely thermal evaporation, chemical vapor deposition (CVD), atomic layer deposition (ALD), magnetron sputtering, pulsed laser deposition (PLD), and electron beam evaporation (e-beam evaporation) in the fabrication of CTLs, perovskite absorbers, encapsulants, and connection layers for monolithic tandem solar cells.