Pre-synthesized quantum dot deposition approach to obtain high efficient quantum dot solar cells

Quantum dot sensitized solar cells (QDSCs) appear to be one of the promising photovoltaic candidates, due to the lower cost of obtaining materials and assembling processes, as well as the advantages of their QD sensitizers which exhibit properties of tailoring the absorbance spectrum to near-infrared (NIR) regions, the multiple exciton generation (MEG), hot electron extraction, etc. However, the difficulty of QDs penetrating into TiO2 mesoporous film remains to be an obstacle for the development of QDSCs, which comes from (1) their larger size (1-10 nm) compared with dye molecules, (2) steric hindrance from the long chain organic ligands on the surface, and (3) the lack of terminal functional group of the ligand with affinity to TiO2. These issues imply the importance of implementing an efficient QD deposition method in the fabrication process. Based on summarizing the advantages and shortcomings, this review demonstrates the development of the QD deposition approaches in direct growth deposition methods: the chemical bath deposition (CBD) method, the successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) method, and the pre-synthesized QD deposition methods: linker-assisted deposition (LA), direct absorption (DA) and electrophoretic deposition (EPD). As an overall comparison to be taken for all these deposition approaches, the pre-synthesized QD deposition method has outperformed the direct growth deposition method due to the use of pre-synthesized high quality QD sensitizers for better performance in surface chemistry. Especially, the LA approach in this method exhibits its excellence of fast and uniform QD deposition with high coverage, as well as in building high efficiency QDSC devices. Specifically, the improved structure of the sensitizers such as the inverted type-I, type-II core/shell structures and alloyed configuration through surface ion-exchange, has been employed to boost the charge injection and depress the charge recombination, benefited from LA pre-synthesized QDs deposition method. The advantages of the LA method are fully illustrated by the examples of the most recent work in the achievement of reaching the record efficiency of QDSCs. Finally, outlooks have been given on possible approaches to realize further improvement of fabricating the QDSCs with excellent performance at higher levels.