Perovskite-Info: the perovskite experts

An international researchers team recently found that a new “double perovskite” material could become a more environmentally friendly platform for spintronics devices thanks to its lead-free nature. While the material in its current form is only magnetic below 30 K – too low for practical applications – developers at Linköping University in Sweden, together with colleagues in the US, the Czech Republic, Japan, Australia and China, say that their preliminary experiments are a promising step towards making rapid and energy-efficient information storage devices from this novel optoelectronic material.

Recently, researchers discovered that lead halide perovskites display interesting spin properties thanks to lead’s strong spin-orbit coupling. This coupling links the motion of an electron to its quantum spin, and its strength determines how much the intrinsic spin of an electron will interact with the magnetic field induced as the electron moves through the material. Such a coupling is therefore important not only for the magnetic properties of a material, but also for the performance of any spintronics devices.

Researchers at POSTECH recently developed an organic spacer molecular additive that can improve both the photoelectric efficiency and stability of perovskites.

The POSTECH team, led by Professor Kilwon Cho and Ph.D. candidate Sungwon Song of the Department of Chemical Engineering, succeeded in fabricating perovskite solar cells that are highly efficient and stable by drastically reducing the concentration of internal defects in the crystals as well as increasing the moisture resistance of perovskite by introducing a new organic spacer molecule additive in the perovskite crystal.

A research team at Stanford University has designed a new perovskite manufacturing process. In their work, the team demonstrated an ultrafast way to produce stable perovskite cells and assemble them into solar modules that could power devices, buildings and even the electricity grid.

“This work provides a new milestone for perovskite manufacturing,” said study senior author Reinhold Dauskardt, the Ruth G. and William K. Bowes Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering. “It resolves some of the most formidable barriers to module-scale manufacturing that the community has been dealing with for years.”

The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under India’s Ministry of Science & Technology, has announced the list of solar and storage projects to be carried out by Indian and Israeli researchers with joint funding by the two nations. The project duration will be two years.

Solar projects selected for joint funding include novel electron and hole transport materials for perovskite solar cells by CSIR Indian Institute of Chemical Technology Hyderabad and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and mixed-dimensional and hybrid bilayered perovskites for high-stability and high-efficiency photovoltaic devices by CSIR National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, Kerala, and Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

A research team, led by Professor Lioz Etgar at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, has developed a screen-printed three-layered all-nanoparticle network as a rigid framework for perovskites. This new design, that facilitates the removal and replacement of degraded perovskite in a solar cell, could open the door to recycling PSCs and thus making their market insertion a much safer, "greener" process.

This matrix reportedly enables perovskites to percolate and form a complementary photoactive network. Two porous conductive oxide layers, separated by a porous insulator, serve as a chemically stable substrate for the cells.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London and Soochow University in China have discovered that unique lead-free perovskite materials could be useful for indoor light harvesting. The team has found that these environmentally friendly materials could harvest enough energy from indoor light to power wireless smart devices.

A novel way to power the multitude of electronic devices we use daily is by converting indoor light from ordinary bulbs into energy, in a similar way to how solar panels harvest energy from sunlight. However, due to the different properties of the light sources, the materials used for solar panels are usually not suitable for harvesting indoor light.

Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites (OIHPs) have great potential for various applications like solar cells, lighting-emitting diodes (LEDs), field effect transistors (FETs) and photodetectors. Among their most important parameters influencing the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of devices based on perovskite materials is their carrier mobility. However, despite massive progress made by introducing new components into the structure to control the mobility of the carriers, the understanding on the atom level of how the components affect the performance is still lacking.

To address this problem, a research team led by Prof. Luo Yi and Prof. Ye Shuji from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has synthesized a series of 2D OHIPs films with large organic spacer cations.