A thin wide band gap organic semiconductor N,N,N',N'-tetraphenyl-benzidine layer has been introduced by spin-coating to engineer the metal-semiconductor interface in the hole-conductor-free perovskite solar cells. The average cell power conversion efficiency (PCE) has been enhanced from 5.26% to 6.26% after the modification and a highest PCE of 6.71% has been achieved. By the aid of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and dark current analysis, it is revealed that this modification can increase interfacial resistance of CH3NH3PbI3/Au interface and retard electron recombination process in the metal-semiconductor interface.

Electrical transients enabled by optical excitation and electric detection provide a distinctive opportunity to study the charge transport, recombination and even the hysteresis of a solar cell in a much wider time window ranging from nanoseconds to seconds. However, controversies on how to exploit these investigations to unravel the charge loss mechanism of the cell have been ongoing. Herein, a new methodology of quantifying the charge loss within the bulk absorber or at the interfaces and the defect properties of junction solar cells has been proposed after the conventional tail-state framework is firstly demonstrated to be unreasonable. This methodology has been successfully applied in the study of commercialized silicon and emerging Cu 2 ZnSn(S, Se) 4 and perovskite solar cells herein and should be universal to other photovoltaic device systems with similar structures. Overall, this work provides an alluring route for comprehensive investigation of dynamic physics processes and charge loss mechanism of junction solar cells and possesses potential applications for other optoelectronic devices.

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