Measurement and data analysis techniques developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory could provide new insight into performance-robbing flaws in crystalline structures, ultimately improving the performance of solar cells.
While solar cells made from light-harvesting perovskite (an organic-inorganic hybrid) materials have recently eclipsed the 20 percent efficiency mark, researchers believe they could do better if they had a clearer picture of energy flow at the nanometer scale. The ORNL discovery, described in a paper published in ACS Photonics, synchronizes microscopy, ultra-short pulses of laser light and data analytics to extract images with single-pixel precision, providing unprecedented detail.
