Why are perovskites so interesting?

Metal halide perovskites are an emerging class of semiconductors which combine exceptional optoelectronic properties with unrivalled easy of processing and synthetic tunability.

Since the first pioneering works in the ‘90s, perovskites have progressed with a series of breakthrough power conversion efficiencies in solar cells especially in the last decade, and they now challenge the performance of well-established photovoltaic technologies.

But their appeal has soon been extended well beyond photovoltaics, reaching a wide range of applications spanning from photodetectors and X-Ray scintillators to light-emitting devices and photonics.

Due to the possibility to combine a metal-halide backbone with organic molecules, they are sometimes regarded as organic-inorganic hybrid materials, and merge the best characteristics of these two worlds maintaining the easy solution processability and spectral tunability typical of organic semiconductors with enormously improved optoelectronic properties endowed by the inorganic framework.

Thanks to their properties, metal halide perovskites could help to overcome the main limitations which have hampered the development of electrically-pumped lasers based on organic semiconductors, such as gain suppression due to formation of triplet excitons, accumulation of charge carriers, low mobility and low damaging thresholds.