TY - JOUR
T1 - Anharmonicity and Disorder in the Black Phases of Cesium Lead Iodide Used for Stable Inorganic Perovskite Solar Cells
AU - Marronnier, Arthur
AU - Roma, Guido
AU - Boyer-Richard, Soline
AU - Pedesseau, Laurent
AU - Jancu, Jean Marc
AU - Bonnassieux, Yvan
AU - Katan, Claudine
AU - Stoumpos, Constantinos C.
AU - Kanatzidis, Mercouri G.
AU - Even, Jacky
N1 - Funding Information:
The PhD project of A.M. is funded by the Graduate School of École des Ponts ParisTech and the French Department of Energy (MTES). HPC resources of TGCC and CINES were used through allocation 2017090642 and x20170906724 GENCI projects. The work at FOTON and ISCR was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, through a FET Open research and innovation action under the Grant Agreement No. 687008. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award No. DE-SC-0012541 (sample synthesis, X-ray synchrotron, radiation, and structural analysis). Use of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. The authors would also like to thank A. Garcia Barker for her editing and proofreading contributions.
PY - 2018/4/24
Y1 - 2018/4/24
N2 - Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites emerged as a new generation of absorber materials for high-efficiency low-cost solar cells in 2009. Very recently, fully inorganic perovskite quantum dots also led to promising efficiencies, making them a potentially stable and efficient alternative to their hybrid cousins. Currently, the record efficiency is obtained with CsPbI3, whose crystallographical characterization is still limited. Here, we show through high-resolution in situ synchrotron XRD measurements that CsPbI3 can be undercooled below its transition temperature and temporarily maintained in its perovskite structure down to room temperature, stabilizing a metastable perovskite polytype (black γ-phase) crucial for photovoltaic applications. Our analysis of the structural phase transitions reveals a highly anisotropic evolution of the individual lattice parameters versus temperature. Structural, vibrational, and electronic properties of all the experimentally observed black phases are further inspected based on several theoretical approaches. Whereas the black γ-phase is shown to behave harmonically around equilibrium, for the tetragonal phase, density functional theory reveals the same anharmonic behavior, with a Brillouin zone-centered double-well instability, as for the cubic phase. Using total energy and vibrational entropy calculations, we highlight the competition between all the low-temperature phases of CsPbI3 (γ, δ, β) and show that avoiding the order-disorder entropy term arising from double-well instabilities is key to preventing the formation of the yellow perovskitoid phase. A symmetry-based tight-binding model, validated by self-consistent GW calculations including spin-orbit coupling, affords further insight into their electronic properties, with evidence of Rashba effect for both cubic and tetragonal phases when using the symmetry-breaking structures obtained through frozen phonon calculations.
AB - Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites emerged as a new generation of absorber materials for high-efficiency low-cost solar cells in 2009. Very recently, fully inorganic perovskite quantum dots also led to promising efficiencies, making them a potentially stable and efficient alternative to their hybrid cousins. Currently, the record efficiency is obtained with CsPbI3, whose crystallographical characterization is still limited. Here, we show through high-resolution in situ synchrotron XRD measurements that CsPbI3 can be undercooled below its transition temperature and temporarily maintained in its perovskite structure down to room temperature, stabilizing a metastable perovskite polytype (black γ-phase) crucial for photovoltaic applications. Our analysis of the structural phase transitions reveals a highly anisotropic evolution of the individual lattice parameters versus temperature. Structural, vibrational, and electronic properties of all the experimentally observed black phases are further inspected based on several theoretical approaches. Whereas the black γ-phase is shown to behave harmonically around equilibrium, for the tetragonal phase, density functional theory reveals the same anharmonic behavior, with a Brillouin zone-centered double-well instability, as for the cubic phase. Using total energy and vibrational entropy calculations, we highlight the competition between all the low-temperature phases of CsPbI3 (γ, δ, β) and show that avoiding the order-disorder entropy term arising from double-well instabilities is key to preventing the formation of the yellow perovskitoid phase. A symmetry-based tight-binding model, validated by self-consistent GW calculations including spin-orbit coupling, affords further insight into their electronic properties, with evidence of Rashba effect for both cubic and tetragonal phases when using the symmetry-breaking structures obtained through frozen phonon calculations.
KW - DFT
KW - Rashba
KW - SXRD
KW - anharmonicity
KW - cesium
KW - inorganic perovskite solar cells
KW - phonons
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U2 - 10.1021/acsnano.8b00267
DO - 10.1021/acsnano.8b00267
M3 - Article
C2 - 29565559
AN - SCOPUS:85045931427
VL - 12
SP - 3477
EP - 3486
JO - ACS Nano
JF - ACS Nano
SN - 1936-0851
IS - 4
ER -