Morphology and structural studies of organic and perovskite solar cells via grazing incidence x-ray scattering

Nowadays, solar industry becomes the fastest growing industry due to the rising demands to solve energy crisis and environmental problems. Third generation solar cells such as organic and perovskite solar cells are all relying on a semiconducting thin-film active layer to harvest the solar energy. The morphology of the active layer in terms of crystal structure, grain size and nanophase separation behavior is known to be critical to the solar cell device performance. Here, we are going to present our recent work on the active layer morphology and its correlations with device performances for several different types of photovoltaic systems. State-of-art synchrotron-based X-ray scattering techniques are employed for the morphology characterization: grazing incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS) for Angstrom-scale ordering and grazing incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) for nano-scale ordering.