Influence of post-synthesis annealing on PbS quantum dot solar cells

Colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) are attractive materials for optoelectronic applications due to their low-cost, facile processing and size-dependent band-gap tunability. Solution-processed organic, inorganic and hybrid ligand-exchange techniques have been widely applied in QDs-based solar cells (QDSCs) to improve the power conversion efficiency (PCE). Till now, however, few have been reported to date the influence of post-synthesis annealing on the electrical characteristics of the PbS QDSCs. To reduce the influence of diffusion length, in this work, we present the thermal annealing treatment effect on the device performance of a typical heterojunction solar cell ITO/ZnO/PbS/Au with a relatively thinner active layer. By changing the annealing temperatures during the post-synthesis processes, we found its PCE increase from 3.26% to 4.52% after annealing at 140 °C, showing a 38.6% enhancement due to a dramatic enhancement of short circuit-current density (J_SC) but a slight decrement of open-circuit voltage (V_OC), and also, the mechanisms underneath for the enhanced performance are discussed in details.