An HZB team has successfully raised funds from the “Helmholtz European Partnering Program” of the Helmholtz Association to expand cooperation with partners of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The topics of the cooperation are tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon and, in particular, their precise characterization.

The TAPAS project is funded by the Helmholtz European Partnering programme for the next three years with 250,000 euros per year each. Following an evaluation, the funding period can be extended by two years. The Helmholtz European Partnering programme was set up to strengthen the European research area, in particular cooperation with countries in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe.

Researchers at Nanjing University in China and the University of Toronto in Canada have fabricated all-perovskite tandem solar cells (PSCs) with remarkable independently certified PCEs of 24.8% for small-area devices (0.049 cm²) and 22.1% for large-area devices (1.05 cm²).

Fabricating all-perovskite tandem solar cells, based on both wide-bandgap and narrow-bandgap perovskites, could lead to a higher power conversion efficiency (PCEs) than that attained by single-junction cells without increasing fabrication costs. In order to build this new type of solar cell, however, researchers need to find a way to enhance the performance of each subcell, while also integrating the wide-bandgap and narrow-bandgap cells synergistically.

An all-inorganic perovskite micro/nano-structure has been demonstrated by a collaborative team of researchers from Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of CAS and Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, that is believed to be a promising candidate for achieving high-performance nano-lasers.

Semiconductor nano-lasers with high spectral purity and stability, namely single-mode nano-lasers, are very desirable in color laser display, on-chip optical communication and computing. To date, most of reported nano-lasers exhibit multi-mode structure resulting from in-homogeneous gain saturation, while the realization of high-quality single-mode laser is very challenging and is largely limited by the cavity structure and the properties of the gain medium.