German university the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Würtetemburg (ZSW) and CIGS module manufacturer Nice Solar Energy have announced an ambition to design tandem PV modules based on CIGS and perovskite, which can theoretically achieve efficiencies well above 30%.

The joint 'Capitano' project will run for three years and has received more than €5 million from Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. The aim of the project is to develop cells with stable higher efficiencies, which can be interconnected to form efficient tandem solar modules.

European Union awards, given to early-career researchers, have recently been given to eight Cambridge researchers, among which were ones working on perovskite-related projects.

The European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants have been awarded to 408 researchers from across Europe. The awards will help individual researchers to build their own teams and conduct world-leading research across all disciplines, creating an estimated 2,500 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at the host institutions.

Researchers led by Prof. MA Cheng from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) have proposed a perovskite-based strategy to address the electrode-electrolyte contact issue that is limiting the development of next-generation solid-state Li batteries. The solid-solid composite electrode created this way reportedly exhibited exceptional capacities and rate performances.

Replacing the organic liquid electrolyte in conventional Li-ion batteries with solid electrolytes can greatly alleviate the safety issues, and potentially break the "glass ceiling" for energy density improvement. However, mainstream electrode materials are also solids. Since the contact between two solids is nearly impossible to be as tight as that between solid and liquid, at present the batteries based on solid electrolytes typically exhibit poor electrode-electrolyte contact and unsatisfactory full-cell performances.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created a nickel oxide material that shows signs of superconductivity.

Also known as a nickelate, it's the first in a potential new family of unconventional superconductors that's very similar to the copper oxides, or cuprates, whose discovery in 1986 raised hopes that superconductors could someday operate at close to room temperature and revolutionize electronic devices, power transmission and other technologies. Those similarities make scientists wonder if nickelates could also superconduct at relatively high temperatures.