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Lead-based perovskite solar cells have gained ground in recent years, showing efficiency as high as 20%, which is on par with that of silicon solar cells. However, the toxicity of lead makes it a nonideal candidate for use in solar cells. Alternatively, tin-based perovskites have been proposed because of their nontoxic nature and abundance. Unfortunately, these solar cells suffer from low efficiency and stability. Here, we propose a new type of perovskite material based on mixed tin and germanium. The material showed a band gap around 1.4-1.5 eV as measured from photoacoustic spectroscopy, which is ideal from the perspective of solar cells. In a solar cell device with inverted planar structure, pure tin perovskite solar cell showed a moderate efficiency of 3.31%. With 5% doping of germanium into the perovskite, the efficiency improved up to 4.48% (6.90% after 72 h) when measured in air without encapsulation.
Ito et al. (Wed,) studied this question.