Proceedings of International Conference on Perovskite Thin Film Photovoltaics and Perovskite Photonics and Optoelectronics (NIPHO20)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nipho.2020.031
Publication date: 25th November 2019
Hybrid lead halide perovskites exhibit an atypical temperature dependence of the fundamental gap for the phases stable at ambient conditions: it decreases in energy with decreasing temperature. Reports ascribe such a behavior to a strong electron-phonon renormalization of the gap, neglecting contributions from thermal expansion. However, high pressure experiments performed on the archetypal perovskite MAPbI3 (MA stands for methylammonium) yield a negative pressure coefficient for the gap of the tetragonal room-temperature phase [1], which speaks against the assumption of negligible thermal expansion effects. Here we show that for MAPbI3 the temperature-induced gap renormalization due to electron-phonon interaction can only account for about 40% of the total energy shift, thus implying thermal expansion to be more if not as important as electron-phonon coupling [2]. Furthermore, this result possesses general validity, holding also for the tetragonal or cubic phase, stable at ambient conditions, of most halide perovskite counterparts. As an example, recent results obtained for a series of FAxMA1-xPbI3 solid solutions, where FA stands for formamidinium [3], will be also presented. A striking result concerns the temperature dependence of the gap of a presumably tetragonal but disordered phase which is stable in a wide range of intermediate compositions and temperatures lower than ca. 250 K. This phase is found to exhibit a quadratic dependence of the band gap with temperature, which is again interpreted in terms of the combined effects of thermal expansion and electron-phonon interaction.