Saliba and Malekshahi reached out to researchers at the Molecular Foundry, a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Fast forward several months, and the Berkeley Lab team has applied a set of techniques to reveal changes in the crystalline structures of perovskite solar cell materials in real-time as they were being fabricated with Saliba's process. The results, published in a recent Advanced Materials paper, provide researchers with a deeper understanding of how to make better perovskite solar cells. "Material fabrication is often a black box," said Carolin Sutter-Fella, a Molecular Foundry staff scientist and one of the paper's corresponding authors. "You can't see what is happening as the material transforms from its initial building blocks to the final state. We built several capabilities that allow us to watch the formation of perovskite and other printable solar cell materials in fine detail. The insights from this work can help researchers address key barriers to commercializing this promising technology." "By continuously taking measurements while depositing the material, we can visually follow how its functional properties evolve," said Tim Kodalle, a Berkeley Lab postdoctoral researcher at the Molecular Foundry and the study's lead author. "It's like watching a video." The work was also conducted at the Advanced Light Source, a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Berkeley Lab. A potential game-changer for solar Perovskites have numerous advantages over the traditional silicon-based solar panels that dominate the solar industry today. For one, they absorb light much more efficiently. As a result, they can be made 100 times thinner and even printed on surfaces. Because they require less material and lower temperatures to process, they are potentially less expensive to produce. Unlike silicon or other... |