ABSTRACT
Organic–inorganic hybrid perovskites had emerged as the most promising photovoltaic materials with comparable or more efficiencies with Silicone in a short span of few years from its discovery. During the less than a decade of its invention in the application of solar cells these materials had recorded a certified efficiency of 21% that promises improving it to even 30%. This has all potential to change the rules of the game. However, thin film forming of perovskites is still a tricky business and solution processing is adding to the vows of instability that is the main hurdle in making perovskites a practical solar energy harvester. In the case of silicon, single-crystalline wafers have much greater efficiency and stability, and the same is expected out of perovskite single crystals also. However, as the diffusion length of carriers in perovskite single crystals will not exceed more than 30–50 μm, only single-crystalline wafers of thickness will have the potential to be used as solar energy harvester. This is a real challenge and despite a lot of reported 150attempts during these years, growing large area thin single-crystalline wafers of perovskites are still evading success. Computational studies on some important aspects of the single-crystalline perovskites are also attempted and made use by experimentalists, though only few can be seen in the literature. In this chapter, these aspects have been described and discussed. Along with these major facets of single-crystalline perovskite evolution, from growth, properties, and characterization are discussed, followed by the challenges and efforts to address the issue of developing effective technique to grow single-crystalline wafers of perovskite having thickness <50 μm. Besides the techniques for fabrication solar cells with such thin wafers of organometallic perovskites will be explained.
