Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Utah have shown that the transport of electrons with a particular spin state through a two-dimensional hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite can be manipulated by introducing special organic molecules in the multilayer structure. These are chiral, which means they prefer one electron helicity over the other. The new study may advance the field of spintronics—electronics that use the minuscule magnetic fields emanating from spinning electrons as well as the electric charges of the electrons themselves—for faster, smaller electronic devices that use less energy.

The Utah researchers worked together under the umbrella of the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences.

Researchers from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania have found that metal chalcogenide perovskites can be used as a thermoelectric material that can convert thermal energy from the sun to usable electric power.

Metal chalcogenide perovskites, with their nontoxic elemental composition, are known to offer greater thermal and aqueous stability than organic-inorganic halide perovskites. This means that they may be more suitable than other materials in the perovskite family to address the two biggest issues in commercial solar cell production: low thermal stability and toxicity.

A team of researchers from Japan's Tokyo Tech have demonstrated perovskites' potential in the production of ammonia directly from hydrogen and nitrogen. This has the potential to open up a new approach to the manufacture of this industrially and agrochemically important gas. Ammonia is used widely an industrial reagent and in the formation of agricultural fertilizers, there are also examples of it being used as a "clean" energy carrier for hydrogen gas for fuel cells.

Masaaki Kitano and his team at Tokyo Tech point out that the main barrier to a facile synthesis of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gas is the surmounting the high energy barrier needed to split diatomic nitrogen. Nitrogen-fixing plants, of course, can handle this process with a range of enzymes evolved over millions of years and metals catalysts coupled with high temperatures and pressures are the mainstays of the industrial process. There have been efforts to make perovskites in which some of their oxygen atoms have been replaced with hydrogen and nitrogen ions to act as ammonia forming materials, but these too only work at a high temperature of more than 800 degrees Celsius and the reaction takes weeks to proceed to completion. These two factors had until now meant perovskites were not looking too promising as a way to create a new ammonia process.