Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV16)
Publication date: 28th March 2016
Spatial positioning of nanocrystal building blocks on a solid surface is a prerequisite for assembling individual nanoparticles into functional devices. Here, we report on the graphoepitaxial liquid-solid growth of nanowires of the photovoltaic compound CH3NH3PbI3 (MAPbI3) in open nanofluidic channels. The guided growth, visualized in real-time with a simple optical microscope, undergoes through a metastable solvatomorph formation in polar aprotic solvents. An important feature of the observed “solvatomorph-graphoepitaxy” is that the crystallization of MAPbI3 solvatomorphs proceeds exclusively in polar aprotic solvents such as dimethylformamide (DMF), dimethylacetamide (DMAc) and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), at near room temperature. The presently discovered crystallization leads to the fabrication of mm2-sized surfaces composed of perovskite nanowires having controlled sizes, cross-sectional shapes, aspect ratios and orientation which have not been achieved thus far by other deposition methods. The automation of this general strategy paves the way towards fabrication of wafer-scale perovskite nanowire thin films well-suited for various optoelectronic devices, e.g. solar cells, lasers, light-emitting diodes and photodetectors.
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