Abstract
Incorporating plasmonic nanostructures is a promising strategy to enhance both the optical and electrical characteristics of photovoltaic devices via more efficient harvesting of incident light. Herein, we report a facile fabrication scheme at low temperature for producing gold nanoparticles embedded in anatase TiO(2) films, which can simultaneously improve the efficiency and stability of n-i-p planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells (PSCs). The PSCs based on rigid and flexible substrates with 0.2 wt % Au-TiO(2)/TiO(2) dual electron transport layers (ETLs) achieved power conversion efficiencies up to 20.31 and 15.36%, superior to that of devices with TiO(2) as a single ETL. Moreover, 0.2 wt % Au-TiO(2)/TiO(2) devices demonstrated significant stability in light soaking, which is attributed to improved light absorption, low charge recombination loss, and enhanced carrier transport, and extraction with the plasmonic Au-TiO(2)/TiO(2) dual ETL. The present work improves the practicability of high-performance and flexible PSCs by engineering the photogenerated carrier dynamics at the interface.