TY - JOUR
T1 - Persistent iodine contamination resulting from thermal evaporation of inorganic perovskites
AU - Burlingame, Quinn C.
AU - Kaplan, Alan B.
AU - Liu, Tianran
AU - Loo, Yueh Lin
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank Rudolph Holley III, Marko Ivancevic, Adam Berry, Xiaoming Zhao, and Melissa Ball for their assistance in cleaning evaporator components, as well as Sean Campbell, Austin Brown, and Elodie Heyer of Angstrom Engineering for their helpful technical advice on evaporator decontamination procedures. Q.C.B. thanks the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation for funding this work through an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemical Sciences. This material is based upon the work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-2039656.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Author(s).
PY - 2022/12/1
Y1 - 2022/12/1
N2 - Thermal evaporation is a promising technique for the fabrication of uniform perovskite films over large areas that forgo the use of hazardous solvents. However, evaporation equipment, particularly at the laboratory scale, is often shared between different materials systems and it is, thus, important to understand the potential impact that halide perovskite evaporation can have on other films and devices processed in the same chamber. Here, we observe that evaporation of perovskite precursors such as PbI2 and CsI results in significant iodine contamination that is not efficiently removed by conventional decontamination procedures such as solvent cleaning, chamber bakeout, and foil replacement. X-ray photoelectron spectra show that this iodine contamination can incorporate itself into organic and metal films grown in the same chamber, which degrades the performance of thermally evaporated organic photovoltaic cells by ∼90%. To remove the contamination and restore the performance of other optoelectronic devices grown in the same chamber, a total resurfacing/replacement of all interior evaporator surfaces was required.
AB - Thermal evaporation is a promising technique for the fabrication of uniform perovskite films over large areas that forgo the use of hazardous solvents. However, evaporation equipment, particularly at the laboratory scale, is often shared between different materials systems and it is, thus, important to understand the potential impact that halide perovskite evaporation can have on other films and devices processed in the same chamber. Here, we observe that evaporation of perovskite precursors such as PbI2 and CsI results in significant iodine contamination that is not efficiently removed by conventional decontamination procedures such as solvent cleaning, chamber bakeout, and foil replacement. X-ray photoelectron spectra show that this iodine contamination can incorporate itself into organic and metal films grown in the same chamber, which degrades the performance of thermally evaporated organic photovoltaic cells by ∼90%. To remove the contamination and restore the performance of other optoelectronic devices grown in the same chamber, a total resurfacing/replacement of all interior evaporator surfaces was required.
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U2 - 10.1116/6.0002174
DO - 10.1116/6.0002174
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85141876184
SN - 2166-2746
VL - 40
JO - Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B
JF - Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B
IS - 6
M1 - 060601
ER -