Perovskite solar cell×Electrochemistry

Perovskite solar cells now routinely deliver photovoltages above 1.1 V with tunable bandgaps—exactly the electrochemical window needed to drive CO2 reduction, water splitting, and organic photoredox synthesis without external bias. The shared physics of ionic transport, electrode interfacial voltage, and cathode design means these two literatures are describing the same device from opposite ends of the same energy cascade. Once researchers recognise that a perovskite absorber layer and an electrochemical half-cell share the same ion-transport and interfacial-voltage language, integrated solar-to-molecule devices will follow rapidly.

The six bridge fields are not generic overlaps—they are precisely the coupling variables between a photovoltaic and an electrochemical cell: Voltage (photovoltage matches reduction potential), Ion (halide migration in perovskites mirrors electrolyte ion dynamics), Cathode (shared interface design problem), and Chemical engineering / Commercialization (scale-up pressure from both sides simultaneously). The 32 bilingual authors are the human bridge: they have the conceptual vocabulary to write integrated proposals today, even though the communities have not formally co-published yet. Independently, both fields have crossed their own performance thresholds—perovskites exceed 26 % PCE and electrochemical CO2 reduction hits >90 % Faradaic efficiency for single products—making co-optimisation suddenly tractable rather than premature.

Groups that already sit at the thin-film device / electrochemical interface boundary will move first: chemical engineering departments with strong materials science wings, energy-focused national laboratories running multidisciplinary teams, and any lab that has published on both perovskite electrode contacts and electrolyte design. Academic groups in Switzerland (where photoelectrochemistry and perovskites share institutional infrastructure), South Korea, and China—all of which have dense author overlap in the bridge fields—are structurally closest. Industrial winners will be electrolyzer manufacturers that can absorb a perovskite photovoltaic front-end, rather than solar-cell companies trying to learn electrochemistry.

A head-to-head techno-economic and device-physics study that directly couples champion perovskite-silicon tandem cells (>28 % PCE, high Voc) to electrochemical CO2-to-CO or CO2-to-formate half-cells, systematically mapping voltage-current matching conditions, quantifying Faradaic efficiency under real solar irradiance cycling, and—critically—characterising perovskite halide-ion migration driven by electrochemical back-potential as the primary degradation pathway. The deliverable is a design-rule framework for the perovskite-electrolyte interface that makes the integrated device stable for >1,000 hours.