The HYPERION team has achieved the project objectives. To do so, we developed several important new techniques to reveal insight into these semiconductors, particularly on the nanoscale. This includes multimodal microscopy techniques to perform measurements on the same scan area, allowing us to correlate the local photophysics properties with the local chemical and structural properties. Using these techniques, we discovered that the non-radiative power losses and instabilities arise from undesired nanoscale phase impurities in processed films grains – a breakthrough in our local understanding of these devices (Nature 2020, Science 2021, Nature 2022). We developed new passivation techniques to minimise the non-radiative losses and ion migration, leading to stable and efficient solar cell devices (Nature, 2018). The work overall revealed the complex, rich nanoscale environments of halide perovskites and how it impacts device performance.
Towards advanced device structures, we developed low bandgap perovskite absorbers that have excellent transport properties (Nature Materials, 2023) and minimise ion migration (Energy and Environmental Science, In Press). We also developed wide bandgap materials through scalable thermal evaporation, realising homogeneous properties that allow control of film parameters, performance and stability (ACS Energy Letters 2020). We have combined these to make high-performance all-perovskite tandem solar cells, with efficiencies >24% utilising a vapour deposited wide bandgap sub-cell (ACS Energy Letters 2023) and studying all-solution-processed systems at the 30% mark (submitted for publication). For LEDs, we have generated high performance red/near-infrared (Nature 2023), green (Nature Electronics 2020) and blue (Nature Photonics, In Press) LEDs, and demonstrated high-quality white light LEDs with >50 lm/W (submitted for publication).
This work has culminated in a number of plenary, invited and contributed talks for the HYPERION team, high-impact papers, and prizes (for the PI: the 2018 Henry Moseley Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics, 2019 Marlow Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2021 Leverhulme Prize and 2021 EES Lectureship; for PhD student Camille Stavrakas: Molecular Foundry Best Student Paper award 2019). Furthermore, a spin out company Swift Solar co-founded by the PI is commercialising high-performance perovskite PV panels utilising the published results (
https://www.swiftsolar.com/(se abrirá en una nueva ventana)) and an ERC Proof of Concept grant has been awarded (PEROVSCI, 957513) to commercialise promising materials for X-Ray detector applications.
