Abstract: To solve the severe energy shortages, a variety of photovoltaic devices such as silicon solar cells, inorganic thin film solar cells, perovskite solar cells, dye-sensitized solar cells, organic solar cells and quantum dot solar cells, have been developed for the utilization of solar energy. Major studies focus on how to improve the photovoltaic performance of these solar cells. Some of ferroelectric materials can be spontaneously polarized and have spontaneous polarization dipole moment inside at room temperature. Recently, some of ferroelectric materials are introduced in these solar cells due to their special properties. They can be used not only as light absorbing materials in ferroelectric solar cells, but also as functional materials due to their ferroelectric characteristic. The measurable macroscopic electric field can be formed inside ferroelectric materials film that can be used as built-in electric field for photovoltaic devices to separate electron-hole pairs and facilitate their transport. Therefore, the introduction of ferroelectric materials into several important solar cells can accelerate the transport rate of photogenerated electrons, thus the short-circuit photocurrent of the cells can be increased and the light-to-electric conversion efficiency is also effectively improved. In this minireview, we summarized the applications of ferroelectric materials in the field of photovoltaics to improve their photovoltaic performance.

Key words: ferroelectric materials, solar cells, spontaneous polarization, photovoltaic performance