Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have reported that the introduction of a certain amount of graphdiyne (25%), a form of carbon material invented by Chinese scientists with independent intellectual property rights, as a host material in perovskite solar cells can successfully push the device efficiency up to 21.01%, achieving multiple positive effects of highly crystalline qualities, large domain sizes and few grain boundaries.

The researchers also revealed that the current-voltage hysteresis was negligible, and device stability was improved as well. It was found that graphdiyne as the host active material significantly affects the crystallization, film morphology and a series of optoelectronic properties of perovskite active layer.

The performance pf perovskite-based solar cells is affected by several factors, one of which can be ion defects that can move around. As these defects move, they affect the internal electric environment within the cell. The Perovskite material is responsible for absorbing light to create electronic charge, and also for helping to extract the charge into an external circuit before it is lost to a process called 'recombination'. Most of the detrimental recombination can occur in different locations within the solar cell. In some designs it occurs mainly within the perovskite, while in others it happens at the edges of the perovskite where it contacts the adjacent materials known as transport layers.

Now, researchers from the Universities of Portsmouth, Southampton and Bath have developed a way to adjust the properties of the transport layers to encourage the ionic defects within the perovskite to move in such a way that they suppress recombination and lead to more efficient charge extraction - increasing the proportion of the light energy falling on the surface of the cell that can ultimately be used.

Researchers from the University of Utah have developed two spintronics devices based on perovskite materials. The researchers used these new devices to demonstrate the high potential of perovksites for spintronics systems. This is a followup to the exciting results announced in 2017 by the same group that showed advantages of perovskites for spintronics.

The researchers used an organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite material with a heavy lead atom that features strong spin-orbit coupling and a long injected spin lifetime. The first device used a spintronic LED, which worked with a magnetic electrode instead of an electron-hole electrode. The perovskite LED lights up with circularly polarized electroluminescence.

A research team led by San Diego State University chemists Xiaolin Zhu and Yong Yan has shown that perovskite materials methylammonium lead tribromide and the cesium analog are not only two of the most studied solar-cell perovskites, but can also function as highly active photocatalysts for organic synthesis.

The researchers used standard methods to prepare the low-cost nanocrystal catalysts and explored their reactivity under blue-light illumination in tests with 2-bromoacetophenone and octanal. The reactions generated a mixture of products, including the aldehyde α-alkylation product, other C-coupling products, and dehalogenated acetophenone.