Investigation of lead-free 2D/3D mixed-dimensional tin perovskite solar cell embedded with plasmonic metal nanoparticles

In this work, various metal nanoparticles have been used to improve the efficiency of a single layer 2D/3D mixed-dimensional hybrid tin perovskite solar cell, exploiting the surface plasmon effect. Silvaco TCAD and Lumerical FDTD software have been used for this study. As a first step, the thickness of perovskite layer, without the presence of any nanoparticles, has been optimized using experimentally determined optical constants. It has been found that the best possible efficiency of 14.13% is obtained at 180 nm. At this thickness, the size and position of metal nanoparticles in the perovskite layer have been varied. With spherical silver nanoparticles of 15 nm radius placed at the electron transport layer interface, the light absorption has been significantly enhanced for wavelengths between 450–600 nm and above 800 nm. Owing to this, the maximum possible photocurrent density improved by 7% to 29.64 $\mathbf{mA}.\mathbf{cm}^{-2}$.