Oxford University researchers attempted to understand what makes certain combinations of elements in the Periodic Table arrange as perovskite crystals and others not, and whether the number and nature of undiscovered pervoskites can be.

The team examined the Norwegian mineralogist Victor Goldschmidt's 1926 hypothesis known as the 'no-rattling' approach: that the formability of perovskites follows a simple geometric principle, namely: The number of anions surrounding a cation tends to be as large as possible, subject to the condition that all anions touch the cation. It basically means that if we describe a crystal using a model of rigid spheres, in a perovskite the spheres tend to be tightly packed, so that none can move around freely. Using elementary geometry, Goldschmidt's hypothesis can be translated into a set of six simple mathematical rules that must be obeyed by the ions of a perovskite.