The material properties of perovskites offer advantages to either simplify or diversify the manufacture of high-performance devices such as flexible, semi-transparent, or tandem cell structures. The first perovskite cell reported in 2009 was unstable and exhibited limited conversion efficiency of only 3.8% ( Kojima et al., 2009), yet the current world record cell has an efficiency exceeding 25% ( Li, 2019 Green et al., 2020). In particular, research and development of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have rapidly evolved during the last years ( Yan et al., 2022). Moreover, the bandgap can be tuned from the near-infrared to the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum by compositional engineering ( Tao et al., 2019), making perovskites suitable candidates for various opto-electrical applications beyond single junction solar cells, for example multi-junction solar cells ( Lal et al., 2017 Li and Zhang, 2020), photodetectors ( Miao and Zhang, 2019 Li et al., 2020) and light emitting diodes ( Tan et al., 2014 Ji et al., 2021). Furthermore, they are characterized by easy fabrication at potential low cost fabrication processes. Organic-inorganic metal halide perovskites are a promising class of absorber materials for photovoltaic applications because of their outstanding opto-electronic properties such as high absorption coefficient, long carrier diffusion length and low non-radiative carrier recombination ( Green et al., 2014 Tonui et al., 2018). Then, by comparing the defect distributions in both spatial and energetic domains for different bias conditions and using fundamental semiconductor equations, we can identify the driving force of hysteresis in terms of slow recombination processes and charge distributions. Our findings identify that the density of shallow interface defects at the interfaces between perovskite and transport layers plays a key role in hysteresis phenomena. In this work, we study the origin of their hysteretic behaviour from the standpoint of fundamental semiconductor physics by means of technology computer aided design electrical simulations. Besides the stunning progress in performance, the understanding of the physical mechanisms and limitations that govern perovskite solar cells are far to be completely unravelled. Organic-inorganic metal halide perovskites have attracted a considerable interest in the photovoltaic scientific community demonstrating a rapid and unprecedented increase in conversion efficiency in the last decade. 2Instituto de Micro y Nanoelectrónica - Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador.
1PVMD Group, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands.Rik van Heerden 1, Paul Procel 1,2*, Luana Mazzarella 1, Rudi Santbergen 1 and Olindo Isabella 1