Sean Shaheen, Frank Barnes and graduate student Benjia (Dak) Dou have published an article entitled "Thermal engineering of FAPbI3 perovskite material via radiative thermal annealing and in situ XRD" in the journal Nature Communications.
The article demonstrates a new processing method for fabricating perovskite photovoltaics, which is a rapidly advancing technology in solar energy research. The article shows how rapid thermal annealing can be use to process the precursor materials into their final, high-quality form in a few seconds, which is much faster than existing annealing techniques that required several minutes or longer times. The result is a much more industrially-relevant process for fabricating perovskite solar cells, as well as a new way to study the fundamental mechanism of how the material is formed.
The work was done in collaboration with Maikel van Hest at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Michael Toney and colleagues at the SLAC National Accelerator.
Congratulations to Sean, Frank and Dak!