This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In a study published in Advanced Optical Materials, researchers at Vilnius University (VU) demonstrated perovskite-based laser structures that maintained stable performance over more than 400 million pulses. Their findings address one of the major challenges limiting the practical use of perovskites: their instability.
These semiconductor materials could play an important role in next-generation optical technologies, but their tendency to degrade has long posed a challenge for researchers worldwide. In some sense, perovskites can be compared to graphene. Like perovskites, graphene spent years being studied in labs because of its potential before industry eventually began using it.
Today, it's widely applied in solar energy, electronics and batteries. Perovskites may hold even greater potential, but they come with a major drawback: they're highly unstable and degrade quickly in the presence of moisture. Scientists are putting effort into figuring out how to overcome these hurdles and unlock perovskites' potential.
Among these researchers are Vilnius University doctoral student and junior researcher Abdul Mannan Majeed and Dr. "Perovskites are popular right now because they're easy to produce using casting methods. Quite a few papers have already been published on the topic, including in some very good journals.
We decided to make our own perovskites using the same spin-casting method in a nitrogen atmosphere, but with reduced lead content, replacing part of the lead with zinc," says Ščajev. Once the samples were made, they needed to be properly tested, which is where Ščajev turned to a colleague, Dr. Vaitkevičius runs experiments using high-resolution confocal microscopy, a technique that uses light to observe how perovskites emit radiation back.
"This emitted light depends first and foremost on the material's chemical properties and composition. It's a way to measure how the environment affects perovskites. Through these tests, we can better understand where and when degradation happens faster or slower, which spots degrade and which don't, and so on.
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