Atomic-level passivation mechanism of ammonium salts enabling highly efficient perovskite solar cells

The high conversion efficiency has made metal halide perovskite solar cells a real break-through in thin film photovoltaic technology in recent years. Here, we introduce a straight-forward strategy to reduce the level of electronic defects present at the interface between the perovskite film and the hole transport layer by treating the perovskite surface with different types of ammonium salts, namely ethylammonium, imidazolium and guanidinium iodide. We use a triple cation perovskite formulation containing primarily formamidinium and small amounts of cesium and methylammonium. We find that this treatment boosts the power conversion efficiency from 20.5% for the control to 22.3%, 22.1%, and 21.0% for the devices treated with ethylammonium, imidazolium and guanidinium iodide, respectively. Best performing devices showed a loss in efficiency of only 5% under full sunlight intensity with maximum power tracking for 550 h. We apply 2D-solid-state NMR to unravel the atomic-level mechanism of this passivation effect.