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Nature Materials (2026)
Tin halide perovskites (THPs) offer narrower bandgaps and improved environmental safety compared with the widely studied lead-based perovskites, but their air sensitivity has hindered their progress and demands new material design to enable their practical applications. Here we report stable and efficient 2D/3D tin perovskite solar cells enabled by new ultrastable 2D and quasi-2D THPs based on the 4-chloro-phenethylammonium (4ClPEA) cation. The stronger π-stacking interactions and tighter interlayer packing in (4ClPEA)2SnI4 among (4XPEA)2SnI4 structures (X = H, F, Cl, Br) substantially impede oxygen and water diffusion, enabling superior air and moisture stability and bright photoluminescence lasting several months in ambient air. The addition of 4ClPEA markedly improves 2D/3D THP film crystallinity and orientation, leading to 16.2% efficient 2D/3D THP solar cells that show prolonged storage stability and operational stability at 55 °C surpassing 1,000 h. This study establishes a new strategy for designing stable and efficient THPs towards their practical applications.
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Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) deposition numbers 2496775–2496777 and 2538309 contain the supplementary crystallographic data for this paper. These data can be obtained free of charge via the CCDC available at www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/data_request/cif. All data needed to evaluate the conclusions of the study are available in the Article or Supplementary Information.
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Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is supported by the Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Department of Energy (DOE), under Award DE-SC0002162. C.T.T. also acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant number DGE-2137424 and the Graduate School and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The study was authored in part by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) for the US DOE under contract number DE-AC36-08GO28308. Work at the NLR, University of Colorado (CU) Boulder and University of Toledo was primarily supported as part of the Center for Hybrid Organic–Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, DOE. The DFT calculations were performed using computational resources sponsored by the DOE Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation and located at the NLR, and the resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operated under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231 using NERSC award BES-ERCAP0032847. GIWAXS was performed at the Colorado Shared Instrumentation in Nanofabrication and Characterization (COSINC-CHR), CU Boulder (Resource Research Identifier RRID: SCR_018985). General device fabrication and characterization was supported by the Perovskite Enabled Tandems programme, funded by the Integrated Energy Systems Office, Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, DOE, award number 52776. We also thank S. Marder for consultation on the NMR analysis. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the US DOE or the US government.
These authors contributed equally: Christopher T. Triggs, Lei Chen, Jiahao Xie.
Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Christopher T. Triggs & Song Jin
Chemistry and Nanoscience Center, National Laboratory of the Rockies, Golden, CO, USA
Lei Chen, Jiselle Y. Ye, Ross A. Kerner, Margherita Taddei, Fengjiu Yang, Bennett Addison, Tianran Liu, Steven P. Harvey, Matthew C. Beard & Kai Zhu
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA
Jiahao Xie, Xiaoming Wang & Yanfa Yan
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
Nicholas J. Weadock & Michael F. Toney
Materials Science Program, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
Nicholas J. Weadock & Michael F. Toney
Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA
Zihan Zhang
Materials Science Program, Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA
Jiselle Y. Ye
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C.T.T., L.C., K.Z. and S.J. conceived the idea and designed the experiments. C.T.T. synthesized the 2D tin perovskites and performed the powder and single-crystal XRD studies. C.T.T. and F.Y. characterized the surface morphologies of the films. L.C., C.T.T. and F.Y. fabricated the tin PSC devices. L.C. conducted the EQE, J–V and long-term device stability measurements. J.X. performed the DFT calculations and analysis, under the guidance of X.W. and Y.Y., which provided theoretical insights. N.J.W. and Z.Z. conducted the GIWAXS measurements and analysis under the guidance of M.F.T. M.T. performed the absorbance characterizations. T.L. and L.C. performed the UV–vis measurements. S.P.H. performed the TOF-SIMS measurements. J.Y.Y. performed the XPS measurements and analysis. J.Y.Y., R.A.K., B.A. and C.T.T. performed the NMR analyses. S.J., K.Z., Y.Y. and M.C.B. supervised the project. C.T.T., L.C., J.X., Y.Y., K.Z. and S.J. wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the revisions of the paper.
Correspondence to Yanfa Yan, Kai Zhu or Song Jin.
C.T.T., L.C., K.Z. and S.J. have filed a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office (application # US64/048,398) based on this work. The other authors declare no competing interests.
Nature Materials thanks Zhubing He, Hairen Tan and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Notes 1–3, Figs. 1–23, Tables 1–8 and References.
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Triggs, C.T., Chen, L., Xie, J. et al. A chlorinated organic cation enables stable 2D/3D tin iodide perovskite photovoltaics. Nat. Mater. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-026-02726-z
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