Photoinduced Dynamic Defects Responsible for the Giant, Reversible, and Bidirectional Light-Soaking Effect in Perovskite Solar Cells

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) exhibit large, reversible, and bidirectional light-soaking effects (LSEs); however, these anomalous LSEs are poorly understood, limiting the stability engineering and commercialization. We present a unified defect theory for the LSEs in lead halide perovskites by reconciling their defect photochemistry, ionic migration, and carrier dynamics. We considered typical detrimental defects (I_Pb, I_i, V_I) and observed that two atomic configurations were favored, where the carrier lifetime of one configuration was nearly 1 order of magnitude longer than that in the other. First-principles calculations showed that light illumination promotes ion-diffusion-assisted transitions from energetically stable configurations to metastable configurations, which are converted back to stable configurations in the dark. Fermi-level-dependent formation energies of stable/metastable configurations were used to rationalize contradictory experimental results of anomalous LSEs in PSCs observed in various studies, thus providing insights for minimizing the LSE to achieve high-performance stable PSCs.