Perovskites are cheap and abundant, they are easily fabricated and they have a high efficiency of energy conversion – these three together are the holy grail of photovoltaics.
- Professor Sir Richard Friend
Discovered 175 years ago in Russia’s mineral treasure box – the Ural Mountains – and named after the mineralogist Count Lev Aleksevich von Perovski, perovskite is fast becoming a ‘rock’ to be reckoned with. In 2013, the use of perovskite materials in solar cells was voted as one of the breakthroughs of the year by Science magazine; more recently, the Guardian website declared that they “are the clean tech material development to watch right now.”
Perovskite is a term used to describe a group of materials that have a distinctive crystal structure of cuboid and diamond shapes. They have long been of interest for their superconducting and ferroelectric properties. But, in the past five years, it was discovered that they are also remarkably efficient at absorbing photons of light and that this can be converted into an electric current in photovoltaic solar cells.
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Image Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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