Fundamentals, advances, and challenges of hybrid organic–inorganic perovskite solar cells

Having been heralded as a new dawn in optoelectronic technologies in 2013, organometal halide perovskites, a highly promising material system in the solar cell community, attained unprecedented certified efficiency of 27.28% in just 15 years for single junction. This impressive accomplishment not only breathed a new spirit into the solar cell field but also became a noetic birth in semiconductors that might find applications that were not at hand before. Perovskites have extraordinary properties like a high absorption coefficient, superior diffusion length, and ambipolar behavior. Nevertheless, there are some hurdles that limit their utilization in commercialization and sharing the market. For instance, perovskites show low tolerance against water, oxygen, heat, and ultraviolet light. Thanks to R & D, most of these limitations have been successfully resolved by using, for instance, glove boxes, UV-filters, interfacial layers, and compositional engineering, and other is still under investigation. In this account, elaborate information and state-of-the-art of the perovskite material and hybrid organic–inorganic perovskite solar cell has been simply discussed. The review follows the rational way of organization, where it firstly covers in detail the crystal structure and electronic features, because they are the main pillars of all the macroscopic properties that make the perovskite solar cell phenomenal. After that, it described the material, history of perovskite, the timeline of the solar cell, attributes of perovskite semiconductor, operational mechanism, versatile solar cell architectures, vulnerabilities, and finally proposed the prospective outlook. By deep inspection of this contribution, one can find that it divides into two main parts: the first part concentrates on the merits, and the second part puts the spotlight on the demerits. The wisdom behind this review is to form a solid background of perovskites and their applications, and intensify the lab research for finding solutions for the limitations of perovskite solar cells. Doing so, it is expected that the perovskite solar cell will be accelerated to join in commercialization and being major player in the market.