Photoluminescence and Photocurrent in Perovskite Solar Cells
Metal Halide Perovskite solar cells are an exciting material for the photovoltaic industry, showing lab efficiencies of over 25% despite having been studied for less than ten years. Unfortunately, perovskites degrade and lose efficiency when exposed to oxygen or water, and this is a primary reasons they are not currently commercialized. In this thesis, the degradation process of the photovoltaics was examined by measuring and imaging a perovskite solar cell’s photoluminescence over time while the cell was exposed to air. The magnitude of the photoluminescence was found to decrease over this time, and the images showed that the degradation was nonuniform–some areas in the image degraded faster than others. The relationship between the photocurrent and photoluminescence of the cell was also examined in this research by measuring the photoluminescence and photocurrent at each point over a rectangular area on the cell. The photoluminescence and photocurrent were found to be slightly correlated in these measurements with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.337.
