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Volume 590 Issue 7847, 25 February 2021

Volume 590 Issue 7847

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Solar flair

Thanks to their potential high efficiency, solar cells based on metal halide perovskites are strong candidates to replace today’s silicon-based cells, but the light-harvesting ability of perovskites remains limited owing to excessive charge-carrier recombination. In this week’s issue, Jangwon Seo and his colleagues report a holistic approach to making perovskite solar cells that improves the management of charge carriers. The researchers have developed a deposition technique that creates high-quality tin oxide electron-transport layers, which they couple with a strategy to precisely control the combination of two perovskite materials in order to improve the opto-electronic properties without sacrificing the bandgap of the active layer in the solar cell. The resulting solar cells have a power-conversion efficiency of 25.2%, which is close to the capabilities of silicon cells, demonstrating that the performance gap between the two technologies is rapidly narrowing.

Cover image: Younghee Lee.

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