Charge-Carrier Cooling and Polarization Memory Loss in Formamidinium Tin Triiodide

Reports of slow charge-carrier cooling in hybrid metal halide perovskites have prompted hopes of achieving higher photovoltaic cell voltages through hot-carrier extraction. However, observations of long-lived hot charge carriers even at low photoexcitation densities and an orders-of-magnitude spread in reported cooling times have been challenging to explain. Here we present ultrafast time-resolved photoluminescence measurements on formamidinum tin triiodide, showing fast initial cooling over tens of picoseconds and demonstrating that a perceived secondary regime of slower cooling instead derives from electronic relaxation, state-filling, and recombination in the presence of energetic disorder. We identify limitations of some widely used approaches to determine charge-carrier temperature and make use of an improved model which accounts for the full photoluminescence line shape. Further, we do not find any persistent polarization anisotropy in FASnI(3) within 270 fs after excitation, indicating that excited carriers rapidly lose both polarization memory and excess energy through interactions with the perovskite lattice.