A crew attempt

The research commenced while Leblebici become trying to find a brand new undertaking. "I notion perovskites are the most exciting issue in solar proper now, and that i actually desired to peer how they paintings on the nanoscale, which has now not been widely studied," she says.

She did not need to go a long way to discover the material. For the past  years, scientists on the close by Joint center for artificial Photosynthesis had been making skinny movies of perovskite-based totally compounds, and reading their capacity to transform sunlight and CO2 into useful chemical compounds including gasoline. Switching gears, they created pervoskite solar cells composed of methylammonium lead iodide. in addition they analyzed the cells' performance on the macroscale.

The scientists also made a 2d set of 1/2 cells that did not have an electrode layer. They packed eight of those cells on a thin movie measuring one rectangular centimeter. these movies were analyzed on the Molecular Foundry, wherein researchers mapped the cells' floor topography at a resolution of ten nanometers. in addition they mapped  homes that relate to the cells' photovoltaic efficiency: photocurrent generation and open circuit voltage.

This become done using a modern atomic force microscopy technique, advanced in collaboration with Park structures, which utilizes a conductive tip to experiment the cloth's floor. The method additionally gets rid of friction between the tip and the sample. this is important due to the fact the cloth is so rough and soft that friction can damage the top and sample, and motive artifacts inside the photocurrent.