Rise of shine

• Autores: Jon Cartwright
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2976, 2014, págs. 42-43
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Cartwright reveals that when it comes to harvesting the sun's energy, a new wonder material is putting others in the shade. Japanese physicist Tsutomu Miyasaka's wonder material, perovskite might shake things up. The crystal usually contains three types of ion; he grew his first samples from ammonium, lead and either bromide or iodide. The breakthrough came when Miyasaka, working with Henry Snaith at the University of Oxford and others, realized that perovskite makes the semiconductor redundant--it can actually shift the electrons and holes better by itself. How exactly it does this remains something of a mystery, but one theory goes that because the material crystallizes easily, the process is less likely to create defects that would otherwise stop charges flowing out freely.