Dielectica traverses through the literature on this device – and summarizes as they appear.
Correspondence prepared by: Sourabh Pal, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. Email id: sourabhelt92@gmail.com (24th September, 2020 08:30 IST)
KOLKATA: Portable electronic devices have now become an indispensable part of our life. The conventional electronic systems pervade in every aspect of human life, whether it is mobile phones, televisions, computers, or medical instruments, and many more. Most of electronic devices has been conquered by optoelectronics which can offer the purposes that are not possible with simple electronics. They can transmit information to a much longer distance at a significantly higher rate. Optoelectronic devices engage those electronic devices that engender light, control light, and convert optical signals into electrical ones. Optoelectronics has become the subject matter of extensive research in recent years, leading to the development of various commercial products, such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) for home lightning and display panel in television, semiconductor lasers as emitters, and photodiodes as detectors for application in communication, medical and defense and solar cells as a renewable energy source for electricity production.
While many of these optoelectronic devices are very well developed and industrially feasible, more fundamental research is required to improve their efficiency and reduce the cost. In the past few decades, inorganic materials such as silicon and III-V compound semiconductors are widely used in manufacturing the aforementioned optoelectronic devices. However, complex manufacturing processes of such devices lead to a higher production cost. Additionally, the high temperature fabrication steps required in the manufacturing process of inorganic devices creates several difficulties for industrializations. Hence, as a savior of current research society, the researchers have discovered a new class of semiconducting materials: the hybrid organic inorganic metal halide perovskites which have been extensively explored for application in optoelectronic devices owing to the extraordinary electrical and optical properties. These materials are expected to benefit from the striking features of both inorganic and organic materials, such as high charge carrier mobility and low temperature processing possibility. The research on perovskite based devices has experienced rapid growth since the last decade.
The perovskite (CaTiO3) is a kind of mineral, which was first identified by Russian mineralogist Gustav Rose in 1839 while performing mineralogical studies at Ural mountains. The mineral was named “perovskite” in the honor of Russian mineralogist Count Lev Aleksevich Von Perovski (1792–1856)[1]. Thereafter, the materials with the crystallographic structure similar to the CaTiO3, like ABX3 are referred to as perovskite. Here ‘A’ denote positively charged large atomic or molecular cations situated at the center of the cube, ‘B’ atoms also of positive charges located at the corners of the cube, and X is an anion (negatively charged) smaller in size, placed at the faces of the cube. The fascinating properties such as ambipolar charge transport, high charge mobility, large absorption coefficients, band-gap tunability, lower exciton binding energy, large diffusion length resulted in the incredible attention in perovskites and their promising applications, ranging from solar cell, novel lasers, photo detectors to field effect transistors among others. During the past few years, it has been observed that the conventional perovskite based materials exhibit excellent photoluminescence quantum yields with tunable light emission property over the entire visible spectral range. Utilizing these exciting luminescence properties, Prof. Zheng and his group from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China fabricated highly efficient LED devices in 2015, from which the new era of quantum LEDs (QLED) has been commenced [2]. The gradual increment of the efficiency of electricity-driven LEDs has been updated every year, which makes the practical application much more feasible. Prof. Wang and a research team of Penn State researchers made the discovery while synthesizing perovskite materials for use in next generation solar cells [3]. Perovskites with a crystal structure good at absorbing visible light are an area of focus in developing both rigid and flexible solar cells that can compete commercially with traditional cells made with silicon. These 2D perovskite materials are cheaper to fabricate than silicon and can be equally efficient at absorbing sunlight. The material offers power conversion efficiencies similar to silicon solar cells but can also be used to develop flexible semi-transparent and light-weight cells appropriate for applications in buildings and a variety of urban spaces. In 2019, a group of Steve Albrecht from Helmholtz Young Investigator Group (YIG) at HZB (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin) and Bernd Stannowski from the HZB Institute PVcomB (Competence Centre Photovoltaics Berlin) have developed a tandem solar cell made of the semiconductors perovskite and silicon that converts 29.15 per cent of the incident light into electrical energy [4]. These are the highest recorded values reported for scalable perovskite solar cells. Recently, NASA stated that a quick way to secure a reliable supply of electricity for an extended stay on the Moon or Mars would use an ink-jet-like printer to make super-thin solar cells from perovskites [5]. This can undoubtedly open up a new pathway towards science and technology. Hence, the remarkable potential demonstrated by the perovskites could lead to a breakthrough in optoelectronics technology. Innovative research on perovskite based devices would further contribute towards the development of a sustainable and accessible electronic world.
Sources:
- “Perovskite: Name Puzzle and German-Russian Odyssey of Discovery” by Eugene A. Katz; DOI: 10.1002/hlca.202000061.
- “Quantum Dot Light-Emitting Diodes Based on Inorganic Perovskite Cesium Lead Halides (CsPbX3 )”, Adv. Mater. 2015, 27, 7162–7167; DOI: 10.1002/adma.201502567.
- “Distinct conducting layer edge states in two-dimensional (2D) halide perovskite”, Science Advances, 2019; 5 (7); DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau324.
- “Highly efficient monolithic perovskite silicon tandem solar cells: analyzing the influence of current mismatch on device performance”, Sustainable Energy & Fuels, 2019, 3, 1995–2005; DOI: 10.1039/c9se00120d.
- “Building Solar Panels in Space Might be as Easy as Clicking Print”, NASA; Website: www.nasa.gov/feature/glenn/2019/building-solar-panels-in-space-might-be-as-easy-as-clicking-print.