Cooling, Scattering, and Recombination—The Role of the Material Quality for the Physics of Tin Halide Perovskites

Abstract Tin‐based perovskites have long remained a side topic in current perovskite optoelectronic research. With the recent efficiency improvement in thin film solar cells and the observation of a long hot carrier cooling time in formamidinium tin iodide (FASnI₃), a thorough understanding of the material's photophysics becomes a pressing matter. Since pronounced background doping can easily obscure the actual material properties, it is of paramount importance to understand how different processing conditions affect the observed behavior. Using photoluminescence spectroscopy, thin films of FASnI₃ fabricated through different protocols are therefore investigated. It is shown that hot carrier relaxation occurs much faster in highly p‐doped films due to carrier–carrier scattering. From high quality thin films, the longitudinal optical phonon energy and the electron–phonon coupling constant are extracted, which are fundamental to understanding carrier cooling. Importantly, high quality films allow for the observation of a previously unreported state of microsecond lifetime at lower energy in FASnI₃, that has important consequences for the discussion of long lived emission in the field of metal halide perovskites.