Origin of the bias instability in CsPbI3 light-emitting diodes

With the rapid development of all-inorganic CsPbX3 (X = I, Br, and Cl) perovskite light-emitting diodes (PeLEDs), their external quantum efficiency (EQE) has made great progress in the last few years. However, severe performance degradation at the operation condition impedes its large-scale industrial application. In this text, by using the advanced spherical aberration corrected transmission electron microscope (TEM), the degradation pathway of PeLEDs under bias loading was more systematically and comprehensively, especially from the viewpoint of its microstructural evolution pathway, which showed that iodine vacancy migration triggered the structural collapse was the primary inducement of performance decay. To solve this problem, inorganic termination ZnI2 was employed to passivate the surface halide vacancy defects and supplement the halide ion into the lattice, which significantly improves the photoluminescence (PL) lifetime and stability of CsPbI3 quantum dots (QDs). As expected, not only the EQE of PeLEDs has been greatly improved, but also the operating half-lifetime is enhanced by about 4 times as compared with the original one. Microstructural characterization and density functional (DFT) calculations confirm that the preferential segregation of Zn element on the surface of QDs was the principal cause to passivate the defect state of QDs, which exhibits lower formation energy and better operational stability.