Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting 2021 (NFM21)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nfm.2021.093
Publication date: 23rd September 2021
Ionizing radiation, wherever present, e.g., in medicine, nuclear environment, or homeland security, due to its strong impact on biological matter, should be closely monitored. Availability of semiconductor materials with distinctive characteristics required for an efficient high-energy photon detection, especially with high atomic numbers (high Z), in sufficiently large, single-crystalline forms, which would also be both chemically and mechanically robust, is still very limited.
Metal halide perovskite were indeed found to meet all aforementioned key requirements, at an extremely low cost. In this work γ-ray detectors based on crystals of methylammonium lead tribromide (MAPbBr3) equipped with carbon electrodes were fabricated, allowing radiation detection by photocurrent measurements at room temperatures with record sensitivities (333.8 μC Gy-1 cm-2 ). Importantly, the devices operated at low bias voltages (<1.0 V), which may enable future low-power operation in energy-sparse environments, including space. The detector prototypes were exposed to radiation from a 60Co source at dose rates up to 2.3 Gy h-1 under ambient and operational conditions for over 100 h, without any sign of degradation. We postulate that the excellent radiation tolerance stems from the intrinsic structural plasticity of the organic-inorganic halide perovskites, which can be attributed to a defect-healing process by fast ion migration at the nanoscale level.
Furthermore, since the sensitivity of the γ-ray detectors is proportional to the volume of the employed MAPbBr3 crystals, a unique crystal growth technique is introduced, baptized as the “oriented crystal-crystal intergrowth” or OC2G method, yielding crystal specimens with volume and mass of over 1000 cm3 and 3.8 kg, respectively. Large-volume specimens have a clear advantage for radiation detection; however, the demonstrated kilogram-scale crystallogenesis coupled with future cutting and slicing technologies may have additional benefits, for instance, enable the development for the first time of crystalline perovskite wafers, which may challenge the status quo of present and future performance limitations in all optoelectronic applications.
The work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (No. 513733) and the ERC advanced grant “PICOPROP” (Grant No. 670918).
nanoGe is a prestigious brand of successful science conferences that are developed along the year in different areas of the world since 2009. Our worldwide conferences cover cutting-edge materials topics like perovskite solar cells, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, solar fuel conversion, surface science, catalysis and two-dimensional materials, among many others.
Previously nanoGe Spring Meeting (NSM) and nanoGe Fall Meeting (NFM), MATSUS is a multiple symposia conference focused on a broad set of topics of advanced materials preparation, their fundamental properties, and their applications, in fields such as renewable energy, photovoltaics, lighting, semiconductor quantum dots, 2-D materials synthesis, charge carriers dynamics, microscopy and spectroscopy semiconductors fundamentals, etc.
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV) is celebrated yearly in May. The main topics are the development, function and modeling of materials and devices for hybrid and organic solar cells. The field is now dominated by perovskite solar cells but also other hybrid technologies, as organic solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and dye-sensitized solar cells and their integration into devices for photoelectrochemical solar fuel production.
Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics
The main topics of the Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics (IPEROP) are discussed every year in Asia-Pacific for gathering the recent advances in the fields of material preparation, modeling and fabrication of perovskite and hybrid and organic materials. Photovoltaic devices are analyzed from fundamental physics and materials properties to a broad set of applications. The conference also covers the developments of perovskite optoelectronics, including light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.
The International Conference on Perovskite Thin Film Photovoltaics Perovskite Photonics and Optoelectronics (NIPHO) is the best place to hear the latest developments in perovskite solar cells as well as on recent advances in the fields of perovskite light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.