A stand out family

摘要

Gustav Rose, a nineteenth-century German mineralogist and crystallographer, first discovered crystal calcium titanate in 1839 in the Ural Mountains and named it 'perovskite' after fellow Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski. Little did he know that the broader family of perovskite materials - including both metal-oxide and metal-halide octahedral structures surrounded by inorganic or organic cations - would have made him so famous in the following centuries among researchers working in very different fields, such as superconductivity, ferroelectrics, water splitting, energy storage and photovoltaics. The chemical versatility of this structure lends itself to almost endless opportunities for optimizing its composition and properties. The chemical exploration of metal-halide perovskites has recently heralded a renaissance for photovoltaic research and has unveiled other intriguing properties, encouraging researchers to test perovskites in an even broader range of applications, such as lighting, electronics, radiation detection and catalysis.