Abstract
Perovskite-organic tandem solar cells (TSCs) have recently garnered significant attention due to their potential for high power conversion efficiency (PCE) and excellent stability. However, their development has been significantly hindered by the large open-circuit voltage (VOC) deficit in organic sub-cells, primarily caused by severe non-radiative recombination, which is closely related to the electroluminescence quantum efficiency (EQEEL) and the photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY). However, mainstream non-fullerene molecules exhibit low PLQY due to the aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ) effect. In this study, an aggregation-induced emission (AIE)-active molecule (TPE-BTA3) featuring a three-dimensional rotor-stereo configuration is rationally designed with an exceptional PLQY of 68%. When TPE-BTA3 is introduced into binary Organic solar cells (OSCs), it not only dramatically enhances the PLQY of alloy-acceptor but also strengthens the utilization of near-infrared photons, leading to a significant increase in VOC and short-circuit current (JSC). By integrated above optimized ternary organic bulk-heterojunction with a wide-bandgap (1.85 eV) perovskite, the constructed perovskite-organic TSCs achieve a surprising PCE of 26.5% (certified as 25.8%). This work establishes a conceptual bridge between high-efficiency photovoltaics and AIE molecular design paradigms.
Similar content being viewed by others
Funding
E.Z. discloses support for the research of this work from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 52073067). Z.Y. discloses support for the research of this work from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 52473184).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Li, X., Du, M., Wang, Z. et al. Aggregation-induced emission luminogen in ternary organic bulk-heterojunction for efficient perovskite-organic tandem solar cells. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73743-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73743-4


