Ozone-Mediated Controllable Hydrolysis for a High-Quality Amorphous NbO_x Electron Transport Layer in Efficient Perovskite Solar Cells

Amorphous NbOx electron transport layer (ETL) shows great potential for boosting the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) at low temperatures (<100 °C). To date, it is still a challenge to simultaneously control the hydrolysis of the NbOx precursor solution and reduce the impurities of NbOx ETLs during low-temperature solution processing under ambient conditions. Herein, for the first time, we report ozone (O3) as a strong ligand to stabilize Nb salt solutions under ambient conditions. The above procedure not only enables the formation of a highly repeatable amorphous NbOx film by suppressing the hydrolysis of the solution but also reduces the OH content in the film, which decreases the defect intensity and improves the conductivity of the NbOx ETL. Thus, the formation of highly repeatable NbOx ETL-based PSCs are obtained; moreover, these PSCs have high PCE values of 19.54 and 16.42% on rigid and flexible substrates, respectively, much higher than the devices based on ETLs from a solution without an O3 treatment.