Very Wide-Bandgap Nanostructured Metal Oxide Materials For Perovskite Solar Cells

Very wide-bandgap undoped and Y2O3-doped ZrO2 nanoparticles were synthetized and their structural, optical, morphological and energy characteristics were investigated. It was found that the bandgap value in ZrO2 decreases with Y2O3 doping. The developed materials were used for fabrication of nanostructured photoelectrodes for perovskite solar cells (PSCs) with the architecture of glass/FTO/ZrO2-Y2O3/CH3NH3PbI3/spiro-MeOTAD/Au. The power conversion efficiency in the PSCs based on ZrO2-Y2O3 photoelectrodes was significantly higher than that for undoped ZrO2 photoelectrodes. We have found that nanostructured layers, based on very wide-bandgap materials could efficiently transfer the injected electrons via a hopping transport mechanism.