Unraveling the Key Relationship Between Perovskite Capacitive Memory, Long Timescale Cooperative Relaxation Phenomena, and Anomalous J-V Hysteresis

Capacitive response at long time scales seems to remain an elusive feature in the analysis of the electrical properties of perovskite-based solar cells. It belongs to one of the critical anomalous effects that arises from the characteristic phenomenology of this type of emerging photovoltaic devices. Thereby, accurately deducing key capacitance feature of new light harvesting perovskites from electrical measurements represents a significant challenge regarding the interpretation of physical processes and the control of undesired mechanisms, such as slow dynamic effects and/or current density-voltage (J-V) hysteresis. Herein, it is shown that long timescale mechanisms that give rise to hysteresis in stable and high-efficiency quadruple-cation perovskites are not due to a classical capacitive behavior in the sense of ideal charge accumulation processes. Instead, it is a phenomenological consequence of slow memory-based capacitive currents and the underlying cooperative relaxations. A fractional dynamics approach, based on the idea of capacitance distribution in perovskite devices, reliably models the slow transient phenomena and the consequent scan-rate- and bias-dependent hysteresis. Observable for a wide variety of photovoltaic halide perovskites, distributed capacitive effects are rather universal anomalous phenomena, which can be related to the long-time electrical response and hysteresis.