A research team at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has fabricated a sensitive photodetector based on lead-free perovskite single crystals.

"We have developed a high performance photodetector based on MA3Sb2I9 microsingle crystals (MSCs)," said Prof. HAN. Scientists found that MA3Sb2I9 single crystals exhibited a low trap-state density of ~1010 cm-3, high carrier mobility of 12.8 cm2 V-1 s-1 and long carrier diffusion length reaching 3.0 μm.

The European Commission has established a new research training network, led by the University of Bath, to make perovskites "truly exploitable" and make perovskite-based devices commercially viable. The new program, called MAESTRO, has been given €4 million in funding and has begun hiring researchers to gain new knowledge and provide innovation in the exploitation of perovskite materials.

A trans-European project, MAESTRO is an inter-sectoral and multidisciplinary network of 10 academic and seven industrial partners from nine EU and EU-Associated countries: the UK, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Israel and Switzerland.

Switzerland-based Avantama demonstrated its perovskite quantum dots at Displayweek 2018. QDs are currently used as color down-conversion films to turn the emission of blue LEDs to white light.

Currently used QDs are either Cadmium-based or Indium-based, and Avantama claims that its pQDs outperform both technologies by a wide margin (3X CdSe, 12x InP), which means that using these will enable much more efficient QD-LCDs. Of course pQDs contain lead, but the amount is very small and it is way below the thresholds required by the EU and other countries.