Six years ago, I came across an interesting publication by David Kiermasch and Kristofer Tvingstedt, [Kiermasch et al 2018], 
titled Revisiting lifetimes from transient electrical characterization of thin film solar cells; a capacitive concern evaluated for silicon, organic and perovskite devices. It shows that particular in thin film solar cells, the time constant determined by voltage based techniques – open circuit voltage decay (OCVD), transient photovoltage (TPV), intensity modulated photovoltage spectroscopy (IMVS) – is in many cases not the recombination lifetime, but corresponds to an RC-time from the device itself. While the authors did not find this effect, they showed impressively how most modern solar cells are limited in this respect, and it has to be verified carefully whether or not the experimentally determined time constants do correspond to recombination lifetimes!
Continue reading “Pitfalls when measuring recombination lifetimes in organic solar cells”
Notes on Disordered Matter 