Abstract
Thermal evaporation is a well-established technique in thin-film manufacturing and holds great promise for the scalable fabrication of perovskite solar cells. However, the performance of fully thermally evaporated perovskite solar cells lags behind that of solution-processed counterparts. Here we report a reverse layer-by-layer deposition strategy to control the diffusion of solid-phase precursor, whereby the organic formamidinium iodide is deposited before the inorganic precursors (CsI/PbCl2/PbI2). Subsequent annealing leads to enhanced interfacial contact, efficient charge extraction and top-down perovskite crystallization with enhanced vertical uniformity. We fabricate fully thermally evaporated inverted perovskite solar cells with power conversion efficiencies of 25.19% (for an active area of 0.066 cm2) and 23.38% (1 cm2 area). Unencapsulated devices retain 95.2% of their initial power conversion efficiency after 1,000 h of continuous operation at the maximum power point.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request. Source data are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29882729) (ref. 44).
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Acknowledgements
Y. Chen acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22425903 and 62288102), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFB4204500), the Basic Research Program of Jiangsu (BK20243057), the Jiangsu Provincial Departments of Science and Technology (BE2022023, BK20220010, BZ2023060 and BK20241875) and the Open Research Fund of Suzhou Laboratory (SZLAB-1308-2024-ZD006). Y. Xia acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22379067). Q.G. acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U24A20568) and the Open Research Fund of Suzhou Laboratory (SZLAB-1308-2024-ZD006). Y. Lv acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52302266). L.C. acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22409091). Z.H. acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62205142). We acknowledge the assistance from Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) for the GIWAXS measurements, and Shanghai Ideaoptics Inc. for the PLQY and QFLS measurements. We thank B. Yu, J. Chen and D. Ma for their assistance in TA measurements.
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Y. Chen and Q.G. conceived of the idea and directed the overall project. W.H., Y. Chen, Q.G. and Y. Xia supervised the work. Y. Xu fabricated all the devices and conducted the characterization. T.P. and X.K. helped with the device fabrication and material characterization. Y. Li and N.M. performed the photoluminescence and electroluminescence imaging characterization. J.L., Y. Cui and Z.W. performed the atomic Kelvin probe force microscopy imaging characterization. K.X. and X.S. performed the density functional theory and molecular dynamics calculations. X.M., Y. Lv, L.C. and Z.H. participated in data analysis. Y. Xia, Q.G. and Y. Chen wrote the paper. All authors read and commented on the paper.
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Nature Photonics thanks Kyungkon Kim, Soo Young Kim and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Notes 1–12, Figs. 1–45 and Table 1.
Supplementary Video 1
The annealing process of RLE precursor film at 170 °C, performed under ambient air condition with a relative humidity (RH) of 20%–30%.
Supplementary Video 2
Molecular dynamics simulation of inter-diffusion of FAI and PbI2 molecules under 443 K.
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Xu, Y., Xu, K., Pan, T. et al. Fully thermally evaporated perovskite solar cells based on reverse layer-by-layer deposition. Nat. Photon. 19, 1345–1352 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01768-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-025-01768-0
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