The rapid rise of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is increasingly limited by the available charge-selective contacts. This work introduces two new hole-selective contacts for p–i–n PSCs that outperform all typical p-contacts in versatility, scalability and PSC power-conversion efficiency (PCE). The molecules are based on carbazole bodies with phosphonic acid anchoring groups and can form self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) on various oxides. Besides minimal material consumption and parasitic absorption, the self-assembly process enables conformal coverage of arbitrarily formed oxide surfaces with simple process control. The SAMs are designed to create an energetically aligned interface to the perovskite absorber without non-radiative losses. For three different perovskite compositions, one of which is prepared by co-evaporation, we show dopant-, additive- and interlayer-free PSCs with stabilized PCEs of up to 21.1%. Further, the conformal coverage allows to realize a monolithic CIGSe/perovskite tandem solar cell with as-deposited, rough CIGSe surface and certified efficiency of 23.26% on an active area of 1 cm2. The simplicity and diverse substrate compatibility of the SAMs might help to further progress perovskite photovoltaics towards a low-cost, widely adopted solar technology.
Time‐resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) is a powerful characterization technique to study carrier dynamics and quantify absorber quality in semiconductors. The minority carrier lifetime, which is critically important for high‐performance solar cells, is often derived from TRPL analysis. However, here it is shown that various nonideal absorber properties can dominate the TRPL signal making reliable extraction of the minority carrier lifetime not possible. Through high‐resolution intensity‐, temperature‐, voltage‐dependent, and spectrally resolved TRPL measurements on absorbers and devices it is shown that photoluminescence (PL) decay times for kesterite materials are dominated by minority carrier detrapping. Therefore, PL decay times do not correspond to the minority carrier lifetime for these materials. The lifetimes measured here are on the order of hundreds of picoseconds in contrast to the nanosecond lifetimes suggested by the decay curves. These results are supported with additional measurements, device simulation, and comparison with recombination limited PL decays measured on Cu(In,Ga)Se2. The kesterite material system is used as a case study to demonstrate the general analysis of TRPL data in the limit of various measurement conditions and nonideal absorber properties. The data indicate that the current bottleneck for kesterite solar cells is the minority carrier lifetime.