Unraveling the Impact of Halide Mixing on Perovskite Stability

Increasing the stability of perovskites is essential for their integration in commercial photovoltaic devices. Halide mixing is suggested as a powerful strategy toward stable perovskite materials. However, the stabilizing effect of the halides critically depends on their distribution in the mixed compound, a topic that is currently under intense debate. Here we successfully determine the exact location of the I and Cl anions in the CH3NH3PbBr3–yIy and CH3NH3PbBr3–zClz mixed halide perovskite lattices and correlate it with the enhanced stability we find for the latter. By combining scanning tunneling microscopy and density functional theory, we predict that, for low ratios, iodine and chlorine incorporation have different effects on the electronic properties and stability of the CH3NH3PbBr3 perovskite material. In addition, we determine the optimal Cl incorporation ratio for stability increase without detrimental band gap modification, providing an important direction for the fabrication of stable perovskite devices. The increased material stability induced by chlorine incorporation is verified by performing photoelectron spectroscopy on a half-cell device architecture. Our findings provide an answer to the current debate on halide incorporation and demonstrate their direct influence on device stability.
This work was supported by funding from the Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, the OIST R&D Cluster Research Program, the OIST Proof of Concept (POC) Program, and JSPS KAKENHI Grant JP18K05266. The work at The University of Toledo was supported by the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science within the US Department of Energy. The theoretical calculation part used the resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC02-05CH11231. The work at ICN2 is funded by the CERCA Program/Generalitat de Catalunya, and supported by the Severo Ochoa program from Spanish MINECO (Grant No. SEV-2017-0706).