Many scientific and technical challenges could be effortlessly addressed if we had the capability to observe the movements of atoms and electrons within materials in real-time. For halide perovskites, a group of minerals increasingly used in a variety of technologies like solar cells and quantum devices, physicists have been striving to comprehend their remarkable optical characteristics for quite some time.
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
“Often one can treat the average position of each DOI: 10.1038/s41567-023-02253-7