Investigation of hysteresis in hole transport layer free metal halide perovskites cells under dark conditions

Recent research is a testimony to the fact that perovskite material based solar cells are most efficient since they exhibit high power conversion efficiency and low cost of fabrication. Various perovskite materials display hysteresis in their current-voltage characteristic which accounts for memory behaviour. In this paper, we demonstrate efficient non-volatile memory devices based on hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite (CH3NH3PbI3) as a resistive switching layer on a Glass/Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) substrate. Our perovskite solar cells have been developed over the fully solution processed electron transport layer (ETL) which is a combination of SnO(2)and mesoporous (m)-TiO(2)scaffold layers. Hysteresis behaviour was observed in the current-voltage analysis achieving high ratio of ON & OFF current under dark and ambient conditions. Proposed perovskite-based Glass/ITO/SnO2/m-TiO2/CH3NH3PbI3/Au device has a hole transport layer (HTL) free structure, which is mainly responsible for a large ratio of ON & OFF current. The presence of voids in the scaffold m-TiO(2)layer are also accountable for increasing electron/hole path length which escalates the recombination rate at the surface of the ETL/perovskite interface resulting in large hysteresis in the I-V curve. This memristor device operates at a low energy due to SnO(2)layer's higher electron mobility and wide energy band gap. Our experimental results also show the dependency of voltage scan range & rate of scanning on the hysteresis behaviour in dark conditions. This memristive behaviour of the proposed device depicts drift in hysteresis loop with respect to the number of cycles, which would have a significant impact in neuromorphic applications. Moreover, due to the identical fabrication process of the proposed perovskite-based memristor device and perovskite solar cells, this device could be integrated inside a photovoltaic array to work as a power-on-chip device, where generation and computation could be possible on the same substrate for memory and neuromorphic applications.