The truth about perovskite - A miracle material that is superior to today's silicon

Researchers have discovered the mysterious properties of perovskite - the so-called 'miracle material'. Thereby paving the way for the development of very high-performance solar cells, far beyond current technology.

Using new microscopy techniques, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to explain why perovskite's unstable structure could increase its effectiveness.

 Perovskite can also be synthesized in the laboratory.

Perovskite materials have emerged in recent years as a promising alternative to solar cells, which rely on crystalline silicon. They absorb sunlight, convert it to electricity more efficiently and are cheaper to manufacture.

Less than a year ago, scientists from the Technical University of Berlin achieved a new world record for solar cell efficiency with perovskite, beating the standard silicon layer's record of 28% with an efficiency of 29, 15%.

This latest study, led by Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in collaboration with the Diamond Light Source synctron facility in Didcot (UK), and Japan's Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, is testing other techniques. each other to better understand perovskite.

'Our idea is to do something called multimodal microscopy, which looks at the same samples with many types of microscopes and essentially tries to correlate the properties that we draw from each one," said Kyle Frohna, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge.

'What we see is two forms of chaos happening in parallel. Electronic chaos involves defects that degrade performance, then steric stoichiometry seems to improve it. What we found is that the chemical disorder - the 'good' disorder in this case - minimizes the 'bad' disorder from the defect, by extracting the charge carriers'.

Forged deep within the Earth's crust, perovskite can also be synthesized in the laboratory and has the potential to transform many different fields.

Perovskite has been hailed as a 'miracle material' for its potential to radically transform everything from solar power to internet speeds.

It may even hold the 'key' of hyperlinks, as a 2017 study found, the material can speed up computers and the internet by up to 1,000 times.

Miguel Anaya, a researcher at the University of Cambridge's Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, said: 'This method paves the way for new avenues for optimization at the nanoscale, which performs better. for the targeted application'.

'Now we can look at different types of perovskite, useful not only for solar cells, but also for LEDs or detectors, and understand how they work'.

Materials science professor Z. Valy Vardeny from the University of Utah described the discovery as 'unbelievable, a wonder material' in 2017, after researchers improved the light efficiency Sun - the energy of perovskite increased more than 10 times in just a few years.