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Charge-carrying films for solar cells made quickly and cleanly

Organic semiconductors used in a promising class of solar cell are processed in a ‘doping’ step to improve the transport of charge carriers. A fast doping method has been developed that might enable mass production of these cells.
  1. Jianfeng Lu

    1. Jianfeng Lu is at State Key Laboratory of Silicate Materials for Architectures, Wuhan University of Technology, 430070 Wuhan, China, and at the Foshan Xianhu Laboratory of the Advanced Energy Science and Technology Guangdong Laboratory, Foshan, China.

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  2. Fuzhi Huang

    1. Fuzhi Huang is at State Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Materials Synthesis and Processing, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China, and at the Foshan Xianhu Laboratory of the Advanced Energy Science and Technology Guangdong Laboratory, Foshan, China.

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The next generation of solar cells could be based on materials called metal halide perovskites. Such devices are cheap, can be fabricated easily from solutions of the constituent materials and convert light into electricity with high efficiency (about 25.5% for cutting-edge devices1). Perovskite solar cells contain a film of an organic semiconductor, which is essential for achieving high power-conversion efficiency. But a key process in the preparation of these films, known as the doping step, typically takes many hours and generates by-products that seriously degrade solar-cell performance2. Writing in Nature, Kong et al.3 report a doping technique that might solve these problems, potentially overcoming a barrier to the commercialization of perovskite solar cells.

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Nature 594, 27-28 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01378-0

References

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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