Discovering lead-free perovskite solar materials with a split-anion approach

Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite solar materials, being low-cost and high-performance, are promising for large-scale deployment of the photovoltaic technology. A key challenge that remains to be addressed is the toxicity of these materials since the high-efficiency solar cells are made of lead-containing materials, in particular, CH₃NH₃PbI₃. Here, based on first-principles calculation, we search for lead-free perovskite materials based on the split-anion approach, where we replace Pb with non-toxic elements while introducing dual anions (i.e., splitting the anion sites) that preserve the charge neutrality. We show that CH₃NH₃BiSeI₂ and CH₃NH₃BiSI₂ exhibit improved band gaps and optical absorption over CH₃NH₃PbI₃. The split-anion approach could also be applied to pure inorganic perovskites, significantly enlarging the pool of candidate materials in the design of low-cost, high-performance and environmentally-friendly perovskite solar materials.