Research on new hybrid materials continues at the Institute of Applied Electrodynamics and Telecommunications.
Recently, hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite materials have aroused great interest as one of the most promising materials for the next generation of photovoltaic modules. The performance of solar cells based on these hybrid compounds is rapidly catching up with traditional inorganic semiconductors and is already above 25%. The highest performance and the best stability of hybrid perovskites are achieved by using mixed-phase compounds, in which part of the crystal components are replaced by cognate components. Despite the very large number of applied studies on such materials, the microscopic aspects of such compounds are not well known.
Here, for the first time, physicists at the VU FF have investigated structural phase transformations and dynamic phenomena in a new type of mixed methylammonium-ethylammonium hybrid perovskites. The phase diagram of these compounds and the influence of mixing on the dynamics and ordering of the molecular cations were determined. This research is expected to lead to the development of more efficient and stable solar cells.
The published research was carried out in collaboration with physicists and chemists from abroad. The crystals were grown by chemists from Poland (Low Temperature and Structure Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences) and the main experiments were carried out in the Microwave Spectroscopy Laboratory of the VU FF. Physicists from Imperial College London also contributed to the research by developing an atomistic model of the processes studied.
The researchers' research has been published in the prestigious American Chemical Society group journal Chemistry of Materials, which has a high citation rate (11).
More information:
Šimėnas et al., "Mixology of MA1-xEAxPbI3 Hybrid Perovskites: Phase Transitions, Cation Dynamics, and Photoluminescence", Chemistry of Materials (2022).
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.2c02807
Funded by LMT (project S-MIP-22-73).
