Abstract
The susceptibility of porphyrin derivatives to light-harvesting and charge-transport operations have enabled these materials to be employed in solar cell applications. The potential of porphyrin derivatives as hole-transporting materials (HTMs) for perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has recently been demonstrated, but knowledge of the relationships between the porphyrin structure and device performance remains insufficient. In this work, a series of novel zinc porphyrin (PZn) derivatives has been developed and employed as HTMs for low-temperature processed PSCs. Key to the design strategy is the incorporation of an electron-deficient pyridine moiety to down-shift the HOMO levels of porphyrin HTMs. The porphyrin HTMs incorporating diphenyl-2-pyridylamine (DPPA) have HOMO levels that are in good agreement with the perovskite active layers, thus facilitating hole transfers from the perovskite to the HTMs. The DPPA-containing zinc porphyrin-based PSCs gave the best performance, with efficiency levels comparable to those of PSCs using spiro-OMeTAD, a current state-of-the-art HTM. In particular, PZn-DPPA-based PSCs show superior air stability, in both doped and undoped forms, to spiro-OMeTAD based devices.