The increasing global energy consumption and the simultaneous non-renewable resources depletion with their rising contamination levels, make the present energy scenario unsustainable. Among all the renewable energies, the sun's energy through its direct conversion into electricity is one of the best alternatives. In particular, since 1991 dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have attracted considerable interest from the scientific and commercial communities due to their promising characteristics as solar light converters. Nevertheless, even though there have been many efforts to increase the photoconversion efficiency through the photovoltaic parameters improvement using novel materials and device construction approaches, the efficiency and stability are still open challenges. On this regard, several approaches and techniques are being used to analyze the dependence of the overall efficiency on these parameters. In particular, the fast and ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy techniques have provided advances towards unraveling the rate constants and quantum yields of the individual processes taking place in sensitized films in air as well as in complete DSSCs. Thus, the aim of this review is to discuss the main recent findings and the importance of the application of these techniques to understand why certain complete DSSC configurations have been more successful than others in terms of good sunlight conversion efficiencies, as well as to draw the basic guidelines on how to make further improvements in DSSCs. We firmly believe that new advances in this research area using ultrafast laser-based spectroscopy will not only help to discover fundamental and yet unknown information about these devices, but will also have impact on related topics like photocatalysis and photonics, supporting both technologies’ development and contributing to the growth of the fundamental knowledge on interactions among photons, electrons and materials.

全球能源消耗的增加以及污染水平的上升同时导致不可再生资源的枯竭，使目前的能源状况难以为继。在所有可再生能源中，通过直接转换为电能的太阳能源是最好的替代能源之一。尤其是，自1991年以来，染料敏化太阳能电池（DSSC）作为太阳能光转换器具有令人鼓舞的特性，因此引起了科学和商业界的极大关注。然而，尽管已经进行了许多努力来通过使用新颖的材料和器件构造方法来通过改善光伏参数来提高光转换效率，但是效率和稳定性仍然是未解决的挑战。在这方面，几种方法和技术被用来分析总体效率对这些参数的依赖性。特别地，快速和超快速时间分辨光谱技术已经为揭示在空气以及完整的DSSC中在感光膜中发生的各个过程的速率常数和量子产率提供了进展。因此，本综述的目的是讨论最近的主要发现以及应用这些技术的重要性，以了解为什么某些完整的DSSC配置在良好的日光转换效率方面比其他完整的DSSC配置更成功，以及得出这些建议。有关如何进一步改善DSSC的基本准则。