Design Strategy for Improving Optical and Electrical Properties and Stability of Lead-Halide Semiconductors

Broad absorption, long-lived photogenerated carriers, high conductance, and high stability are all required for a light absorber toward its real application on solar cells. Inorganic-organic hybrid lead-halide materials have shown tremendous potential for applications in solar cells. This work offers a new design strategy to improve the absorption range, conductance, photoconductance, and stability of these materials. We synthesized a new photochromic lead-chloride semiconductor by incorporating a photoactive viologen zwitterion into a lead-chloride system in the coordinating mode. This semiconductor has a novel inorganic-organic hybrid structure, where 1-D semiconducting inorganic lead-chloride nanoribbons covalently bond to 1-D semiconducting organic π-aggregates. It shows high stability against light, heat, and moisture. After photoinduced electron transfer (PIET), it yields a long-lived charge-separated state with a broad absorption band covering the 200-900 nm region while increasing its conductance and photoconductance. This work is the first to modify the photoconductance of semiconductors by PIET. The observed increasing times of conductivity reached 3 orders of magnitude, which represents a record for photoswitchable semiconductors. The increasing photocurrent comes mainly from the semiconducting organic π-aggregates, which indicates a chance to improve the photocurrent by modifying the organic component. These findings contribute to the exploration of light absorbers for solar cells.