Synergistic Passivation of Bulk and Interfacial Defects Improves Efficiency and Stability of Inverted Perovskite Solar Cells

Defects both in bulk and at the interfaces serve as charge trapping sites for nonradiative recombination and as ion migration pathways, resulting in degradation of perovskite solar cell efficiency and stability. In this work, a strategy for simultaneous passivation of both bulk and interfacial defects is reported. For bulk passivation polystyrene (PS) is used as an additive in the perovskite precursor which reduces the structural defects by forming larger defect-free grains. While the F-PEAI cation is used to passivate the interfacial defects, present at both perovskite HTL/ETL interfaces. Furthermore, by conducting control measurements with just bulk modification (PS), just interface modification (F-PEAI), and a combination of both, the role of individual defect passivation strategies is decoupled. As a result of simultaneous bulk as well as interfacial passivation, the modified perovskite solar cell shows the highest efficiency of 22.32% with a high Voc of 1.14 V and fill factor of 80%. Moreover, the cells have excellent stability retaining 92% and 99% of their initial efficiency after 1008 h and 560 h under ISOS- D1 and D2 storage conditions. These results highlight the importance of simultaneous bulk and interfacial passivation for improving solar cell efficiency and stability.