Caffeine Cranks Up Solar Cells

UCLA professor Yang Yang’s lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Caffeine also stabilizes perovskite PV cells during operation because each caffeine molecule can bind to two lead atoms at the boundaries of the crystal grains. So as Yang’s students continue to test their champion cell, they are simultaneously leveraging what caffeine has taught them to seek out even better perovskite calming agents.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org