June 2016

The World Economic Forum, best known for its annual winter Davos meeting, in collaboration with Scientific American, has published its top 10 Emerging Technologies 2016 list. This list highlights technological advances that the forum members believe have the power to improve lives, transform industries and safeguard the planet.

Perovskite solar cells are included in the WEForum's list. It is explained that perovskite materials offer three advantages over silicon-based solar cells: they are easier to producer, can be used anywhere (as they can be made to produce thin, light, flexible and transparent cells) and are highly efficient.

Aixtron announced that it will be pushing forward with research on perovskite solar cells within the 'PeroBOOST' project together with University of Cologne, Enerthing, Lunovu, SOLUXX, the Center for Organic Electronics Cologne (ZOEK), the Fraunhofer ISE Laboratory and Service Center Gelsenkirchen, and Duisburg-Essen University.

The basis for this three-year project (03/2016-02/2019) is the discovery of the superb properties of organo-perovskite materials for efficient solar cells. The 'PeroBOOST' project will be focusing above all on two aspects and aiming to develop these further: Efficient and stable lead-free perovskite solar cells, and scaling up methods and techniques.

Researchers from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have designed a system that uses an innovative color converter based on luminescent materials known as phosphors, which are commonly used in LED lights, and combines them with nanocrystals of perovskite. This system has achieved record bandwidth, providing a data transmission rate of 2Gbit per second.

The major achievements in this work are breaking the record for data communication using visible light and, even more impressively, producing white light with a very high color-rendering index of 89, by designing a special color converter based on hybrid perovskite nanocrystals. The work demonstrates white light as both a lighting source and a system for ultra-high-speed data communications.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin'Madison have discovered that a perovskite material could greatly enhance the technology of vacuum electronics. The material is capable of promoting the output power of the electron beam, and enables remote sensing and long-distance communications for a much lower energy cost than currently spent.

The researchers received a $1.3 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They aimed to synthesize large quantities of the material and additionally analyze its properties. They also hope to locate other applications where this concept can be utilized.

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Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, USA have found out why perovskite solar cells degrade in sunlight, as well as how the devices can 'self-heal' by being given time in the dark. The research, that determined that photo-degradation in perovskite cells is a purely electronic process due to charge accumulation without chemical damage to the crystal structure, could help catalyze the promising solar technology.

The new finding, that organometallic halide semiconducting perovskite solar cells degrade under continuous sunlight but recover in the dark is seen as very good news as it means the process is of physical nature rather than chemical decomposition. According to the researchers: 'After extensive characterization electronically and optically, we found it was the charge accumulation in the cell that reduces the photo-generated electrical current. Our team predicts the charge accumulation is initiated by the charged trap states, called small polaron states, which is only activated under light.'

Scientists at Syracuse University and Brookhaven National Laboratory found a new way to visualize and monitor chemical reactions in real time using perovskites. They have designed a nanomaterial that changes color when it interacts with ions and other small molecules during a chemical reaction, allowing to monitor reactions qualitatively with the naked eye and quantitatively with simple instrumentation.

The researchers explain that many chemical reactions occur in a solution that is colorless and transparent so the only way to know if a reaction has occurred or not is to perform extensive analysis after a multi-step purification. This new method represents a simpler way to investigate why and how fast a reaction occurs (if at all). The group has designed a nanoparticle that reacts with by-products of the reaction. When the reaction occurs, the nanoparticle fluoresces at a different color, allowing to gauge kinetics by eye, instead of using special equipment.

Researchers at the University of Washington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford have been trying to find ways to repair inherent perovskite defects in order to improve the efficiency of solar cells. They showed that the photons they shined on the perovskite cells had a therapeutic effect, and exposure to intense visible light increased the energy conversion efficiency of the perovskite crystals.

Using perovskite crystals synthesized at Oxford University, the scientists showed that intense light exposure helped crystals repair themselves by physically transporting iodine during illumination. They used two powerful imaging techniques to show that iodine ions within perovskite crystals moved away from intense light.

Nanoelectronics research center imec has presented what is thought to be the first-ever semi-transparent perovskite PV-module, achieving power conversion efficiencies up to 12%. This technology may enable semi-transparent PV-windows and other such advanced applications. Moreover, combining these semitransparent perovskite modules with Si solar cells, an unprecedented 20.2% in power conversion efficiency for a perovskite/Si stacked solar module was achieved.

The semi-transparent perovskite modules of imec realized by scalable coating techniques showed efficiencies of 12% on sizes as large as 4 cm2 and 10 % on sizes as large as 16cm2, a world-best achievement in this domain.