Publications

Energy Materials Laboratory

Publications

Emerging Earth-Abundant Solar Absorbers
Authors
J. Choi, B. Shin, P. Gorai, R. L. Z. Hoye, R. Palgrave
Journal
ACS Energy Letters
Vol
7
Page
1553-1557
Year
2022

Developing solar absorbers that are efficient, low-cost, stable, and composed of nontoxic, Earth-abundant elements has long been the holy grail of next-generation photovoltaics (PV) research. (1) This effort has been disrupted by the advent and rapid rise in performance of solution-processable lead-halide perovskites. (2) One of the key enabling properties is the ability of these halide perovskites to tolerate point defects, enabling efficient PV performance despite high defect densities. (3,4) This discovery has reinvigorated efforts within the Earth-abundant PV community to design efficient solar absorbers, drawing inspiration from the halide perovskites, with particular focus on defect tolerance and achieving materials with long diffusion lengths. At the same time, the broad families of Earth-abundant solar absorbers provide valuable opportunities to overcome the toxicity and stability limitations of the lead-halide perovskites, without remaining confined solely within the perovskite family of compounds. The merging of these two communities has produced exciting new frontiers, which were explored in the recent symposium on “Earth-abundant next generation materials for solar energy” (Symposium F) at the 2021 Fall European Materials Research Society Meeting (held virtually). Herein, we feature some of the key emerging areas discussed at the Symposium: chalcogenide perovskites, II–IV–N2 compounds, antimony chalcogenides, and the computational search for novel defect-tolerant solar absorbers.