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IMAGE: A hydrogen vacancy (the black spot left of center) created by removing hydrogen from a methylammonium molecule, traps carriers in the prototypical hybrid perovskite, mehtylammonium lead iodide CH3NH3Pbl3
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Credit: Xie Zhang
Researchers in the materials department in UC Santa Barbara's College of Engineering have uncovered a major cause of limitations to efficiency in a new generation of solar cells.
Various possible defects in the lattice of what are known as hybrid perovskites had previously been considered as the potential cause of such limitations, but it was assumed that the organic molecules (the components responsible for the "hybrid" moniker) would remain intact. Cutting-edge computations have now revealed that missing hydrogen atoms in these molecules can cause massive efficiency losses. The findings are published in a paper titled "Minimizing hydrogen vacancies to enable highly efficient hybrid perovskites," in the April 29 issue of the journal