Physics of Perovskite Solar Cells: Efficiency, Open‐Circuit Voltage, and Recombination

In this chapter, we aimed to give an illustrative introduction into the physics of solar cells without going into too much detail as those are discussed in solar cell textbooks. Instead, this chapter accounts for applied aspects of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and addresses students and researchers of various backgrounds. The focus is on how to characterize and interpret efficiency-limiting processes correctly. It advocates for a careful deployment of established characterization methods whose common interpretations might not be readily applicable to PSCs, probable reasons being the thin-film solar cell architecture with a highly emissive absorber or peculiar properties of the perovskite as a mixed ionic–electronic conductor. Therefore, Section 6 is the core of this chapter, where a variety of characterization techniques are reviewed and analyzed using data from PSCs. Prior to this section, the fundamentals of solar cells are briefly introduced in Section 1. Finally, Section 16 deals with what is known about major loss mechanisms in PSCs and their origin in the device architecture, material composition, and microstructure without going into the atomistic levels of their details.