Continuous flash sublimation of inorganic halide perovskites: overcoming rate and continuity limitations of vapor deposition

Abstract

Despite the outstanding progress in performance of halide perovskite solar cell absorbers fabricated via vapor-based approaches, increasing deposition rates as well as enabling continuous deposition has been woefully neglected. In fact, recent reports show deposition times for the fabrication of high performing absorbers typically in the range of hours, being orders of magnitude away from industrially reasonable process times. In this work, continuous flash sublimation (CFS) of halide perovskite absorbers is introduced as a concept to overcome the fundamental rate and continuity limitations of current approaches, while at the same time maintaining the performance of previously reported vapor deposition approaches. Using CFS, we reduce the time required to deposit a fully absorbing layer to less than 5 minutes, demonstrating the applicability of vapor deposited halide perovskites for commercialization. Additionally, the approach enables continuous deposition, thus circumventing another major bottleneck of established vapor deposition approaches.