Low Dosage <i>In-situ</i> and <i>Ex-situ</i> S/TEM Characterization of Hybrid Organic-Inorganic MAPbI3
Hybrid organic-inorganic halide perovskites (HPs) show great promise for a variety of applications, including low-cost high efficiency solar-cells.Recent improvements in the HP solar cells performance focused on processing conditions optimization at the macroscopic length-scale [1], while structural characterization at the nanometer length-scale remains under-explored.Their high electron beam sensitivity translates to various challenges when applying common S/TEM characterization techniques, that are otherwise ideal for addressing structure-property relations.To date, S/TEM based work on HPs that employed very low electron dosages included adjustment of the samples to increase their electron beam stability, such as doping, coating or use of evaporated samples [2, 3], which are not representative of the solution-based processing techniques conventionally used for HPs.In this work we employ complementary low dosage S/TEM routes to characterize undoped solution based MAPbI 3 (without coating).Low dosage S/TEM imaging, including drift-corrected and dosage-calibrated imaging (see figure 1), was used to define the onset of degradation, determine where it initiates, and account for sources of variability in those aspects.Low dosage diffraction based techniques were used to map the microstructure over larger regions while avoiding imaging artifacts that are present in fast Fourier transforms (FFTs).Finally, environmental TEM was used to account for the effect of exposure to air (see figure 2) [4].
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