Pressure Effects on Lead-Free Metal Halide Perovskites: a Route to Design Optimized Materials for Photovoltaics

摘要

Metal halide perovskites have drawn significant attention for their promisingphysical properties and their possible application in solar cells and light-emittingdiodes. Research and technology have made extraordinary progress in this field, butsome issues are still to be tackled. In fact, most of the used materials contain lead,which is highly toxic. For this reason, many efforts have been made on substitutinglead with other elements to design more environmentally friendly solar cells.However, devices based on lead-free materials still show relatively low efficiencies.Physical properties tuning of such materials, to improve their performance, can beachieved in different ways, and among them pressure can be thought of as a greenmethod for this aim as well as a powerful technique to systematically explorestructure–property relationships. The possibility of unveiling and discovering noveland appealing optical and electronic features, resulting from the application of anexternal pressure, can open an effective route to design more performing materials.