The international research team found that excited electrons (at the centre of the image) can straighten out the skewed crystal lattice of perovskite nanocrystals. (Image: Nuri Yasdani / ETH Zurich)
The international research team found that excited electrons (at the centre of the image) can straighten out the skewed crystal lattice of perovskite nanocrystals. (Image: Nuri Yasdani / ETH Zurich) Researchers from ETH Zurich, Empa and Stanford have taken snapshots of the crystal structure of perovskite nanocrystals as it was deformed by excited electrons. To their surprise, the deformation straightened out the skewed crystal structure rather than making it more disordered. Many a scientific and technical problem could be solved easily if it were possible to look inside a material and watch its atoms and electrons wiggle about in real time. In the case of halide perovskites, a class of minerals that has become very popular in recent years for their use in technologies ranging from solar cells to quantum technologies, physicists have long tried to understand their excellent optical properties. A team of researchers led by Nuri Yazdani and Vanessa Wood at ETH Zurich, and Aaron Lindenberg at Stanford, along with colleagues at Empa in Dübendorf, have now made significant progress towards our understanding of perovskites by studying the motion of atoms inside nanocrystals with a time resolution of a few billionths of a second. They recently published their findings in the scientific journal Nature Physics.
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