Rice University graduate student Siraj Sidhik prepares to spin-coat a substrate with a compound that solidifies into a 2D perovskite. The researchers found placing a layer of organic cations between the iodide on top and lead on the bottom enhanced interactions between the layers. "We find that as you light the material, you kind of squeeze it like a sponge and bring the layers together to enhance the charge transport in that direction," Mohite said. Department of Energy national laboratories Los Alamos, Argonne and Brookhaven and the Institute of Electronics and Digital Technologies (INSA) in Rennes, France, discovered that in certain 2D perovskites, sunlight effectively shrinks the space between the atoms, improving their ability to carry a current. The Rice engineers and their collaborators at Purdue and Northwestern universities, U.S. "The big issue has been to make them efficient without compromising the stability," he said. In contrast, 2D perovskites have tremendous stability but are not efficient enough to put on a roof. "We've been working for many years and continue to work with bulk perovskites that are very efficient but not as stable.
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"A solar cell technology is expected to work for 20 to 25 years," said Mohite, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of materials science and nanoengineering. Their potential has been known for years, but they present a conundrum: They're good at converting sunlight into energy, but sunlight and moisture degrade them. Perovskites are compounds that have cubelike crystal lattices and are highly efficient light harvesters. The research appears in Nature Nanotechnology.
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"Other semiconductors have taken about 60 years to get there. "In 10 years, the efficiencies of perovskites have skyrocketed from about 3% to over 25%," Mohite said. Brown School of Engineering discovered that sunlight itself contracts the space between atomic layers in 2D perovskites enough to improve the material's photovoltaic efficiency by up to 18%, an astounding leap in a field where progress is often measured in fractions of a percent. The lab of Aditya Mohite of Rice's George R.