Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

© Photo: Natalie Hill/Greentown Labs

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

© Photo: Natalie Hill/Greentown Labs

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

© Photo: Natalie Hill/Greentown Labs

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

© Photo: Natalie Hill/Greentown Labs

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

© Photo: Natalie Hill/Greentown Labs

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

The scene: A space-based solar power station called the Converter being commissioned some time in the Future. The characters: Two astronauts, Powell and Donovan, and a robot named QT-1 (“Cutie” to its human friends). The plot: The astronauts are training Cutie to take over the station’s operations, which involve collecting solar energy in space and then directing it as intense beams of microwaves down to Earth.

This is the backdrop for Isaac Asimov’s 1941 short story “Reason.” Most of the story centers around Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the humans’ relationship with the robot. But the station itself is worth a second look. It’s pretty clear Asimov had no idea how a system like the Converter would actually work, except in the most basic terms. Here’s how Powell tries to explain it to Cutie:

“Our beams feed these worlds energy drawn from one of those huge incandescent globes that happens to be near us. We call that globe the Sun and it is on the other side of the station where you can’t see it.”

Harnessing the power of the sun in space is certainly an enticing idea. A decade ago we featured a project at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency that aimed to launch a 1-gigawatt solar station by 2031. As a step in that direction, JAXA says it will demonstrate a small satellite transmitting 1 kilowatt of power to Earth from an altitude of 400 kilometers next year. We’ve also reported on Caltech’s SSPD-1 demonstrator project and the US $100 million from a billionaire donor who funds it.

A space solar project would “waste capital that could be better spent improving less risky ways to shore up renewable energy, such as batteries, hydrogen, and grid improvements.”

And yet, space-based solar power remains more science fiction than science fact, as Henri Barde writes in “Castles in the Sky?” Barde should know: He recently retired from the European Space Agency, where among other things he evaluated space power systems. As Barde’s article makes abundantly clear, this clean energy would come at an enormous cost, if it can be done at all, “[wasting] capital that could be better spent improving less risky ways to shore up renewable energy, such as batteries, hydrogen, and grid improvements.”

For example, U.K.-based Space Solar estimates it will need 68 (!) SpaceX Starship launches to loft all the assets necessary to build one 1.7-km-long solar array in orbit. Nevermind that SpaceX hasn’t yet successfully launched a Starship into orbit and brought it back in one piece. Even if the company can eventually get the price down to $10 million per launch, we’re still talking hundreds of millions of dollars in launch costs alone. We also don’t have real-life Cuties to build such a station. And the ground stations and rectennas necessary for receiving the beamed power and putting it on the grid are still just distant dots on a road map in someone’s multimillion dollar research proposal.

Engineers are often inspired by science fiction. But inspiration only gets you so far. Space-based solar power will remain sci-fi fodder for the foreseeable future. For the monumental task of electrifying everything while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it’s better to focus on solutions based on technology already in hand, like conventional geothermal, nuclear, wind, and Earth-based solar, rather than wasting time, brainpower, and money on a fantasy.

This article appears in the June 2024 print issue as “The Chasm Between Imagination and Feasibility.”

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

© Photo: Natalie Hill/Greentown Labs

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

© Photo: Natalie Hill/Greentown Labs

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Consider the dizzying ascent of solar energy in the United States: In the past decade, solar capacity increased nearly 900 percent, with electricity production eight times greater in 2023 than in 2014. The jump from 2022 to 2023 alone was 51 percent, with a record 32 gigawatts (GW) of solar installations coming online. In the past four years, more solar has been added to the grid than any other form of generation. Installed solar now tops 179 GW, enough to power nearly 33 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is so bullish on the sun that its decarbonization plans envision solar satisfying 45 percent of the nation’s electricity demands by 2050.

But the continued rapid expansion of solar requires advances in technology, notably to improve the efficiency and durability of solar photovoltaic (PV) materials and manufacturing. That’s where Optigon, a three-year-old MIT spinout company, comes in.

“Our goal is to build tools for research and industry that can accelerate the energy transition,” says Dane deQuilettes, the company’s co-founder and chief science officer. “The technology we have developed for solar will enable measurements and analysis of materials as they are being made both in lab and on the manufacturing line, dramatically speeding up the optimization of PV.”

With roots in MIT’s vibrant solar research community, Optigon is poised for a 2024 rollout of technology it believes will drastically pick up the pace of solar power and other clean energy projects.

Beyond silicon

Silicon, the material mainstay of most PV, is limited by the laws of physics in the efficiencies it can achieve converting photons from the sun into electrical energy. Silicon-based solar cells can theoretically reach power conversion levels of just 30 percent, and real-world efficiency levels hover in the low 20s. But beyond the physical limitations of silicon, there is another issue at play for many researchers and the solar industry in the United States and elsewhere: China dominates the silicon PV market, from supply chains to manufacturing.

Scientists are eagerly pursuing alternative materials, either for enhancing silicon’s solar conversion capacity or for replacing silicon altogether.

In the past decade, a family of crystal-structured semiconductors known as perovskites has risen to the fore as a next-generation PV material candidate. Perovskite devices lend themselves to a novel manufacturing process using printing technology that could circumvent the supply chain juggernaut China has built for silicon. Perovskite solar cells can be stacked on each other or layered atop silicon PV, to achieve higher conversion efficiencies. Because perovskite technology is flexible and lightweight, modules can be used on roofs and other structures that cannot support heavier silicon PV, lowering costs and enabling a wider range of building-integrated solar devices.

But these new materials require testing, both during R&D and then on assembly lines, where missing or defective optical, electrical, or dimensional properties in the nano-sized crystal structures can negatively impact the end product.

“The actual measurement and data analysis processes have been really, really slow, because you have to use a bunch of separate tools that are all very manual,” says Optigon co-founder and chief executive officer Anthony Troupe ’21. “We wanted to come up with tools for automating detection of a material’s properties, for determining whether it could make a good or bad solar cell, and then for optimizing it.”

“Our approach packed several non-contact, optical measurements using different types of light sources and detectors into a single system, which together provide a holistic, cross-sectional view of the material,” says Brandon Motes ’21, ME ’22, co-founder and chief technical officer.

“This breakthrough in achieving millisecond timescales for data collection and analysis means we can take research-quality tools and actually put them on a full production system, getting extremely detailed information about products being built at massive, gigawatt scale in real-time,” says Troupe.

This streamlined system takes measurements “in the snap of the fingers, unlike the traditional tools,” says Joseph Berry, director of the US Manufacturing of Advanced Perovskites Consortium and a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Optigon’s techniques are high precision and allow high throughput, which means they can be used in a lot of contexts where you want rapid feedback and the ability to develop materials very, very quickly.”

According to Berry, Optigon’s technology may give the solar industry not just better materials, but the ability to pump out high-quality PV products at a brisker clip than is currently possible. “If Optigon is successful in deploying their technology, then we can more rapidly develop the materials that we need, manufacturing with the requisite precision again and again,” he says. “This could lead to the next generation of PV modules at a much, much lower cost.”

Measuring makes the difference

With Small Business Innovation Research funding from DOE to commercialize its products and a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Optigon has settled into a space at the climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. Here, the team is preparing for this spring’s launch of its first commercial product, whose genesis lies in MIT’s GridEdge Solar Research Program.

Led by Vladimir Bulović, a professor of electrical engineering and the director of MIT.nano, the GridEdge program was established with funding from the Tata Trusts to develop lightweight, flexible, and inexpensive solar cells for distribution to rural communities around the globe. When deQuilettes joined the group in 2017 as a postdoc, he was tasked with directing the program and building the infrastructure to study and make perovskite solar modules.

“We were trying to understand once we made the material whether or not it was good,” he recalls. “There were no good commercial metrology [the science of measurements] tools for materials beyond silicon, so we started to build our own.” Recognizing the group’s need for greater expertise on the problem, especially in the areas of electrical, software, and mechanical engineering, deQuilettes put a call out for undergraduate researchers to help build metrology tools for new solar materials.

“Forty people inquired, but when I met Brandon and Anthony, something clicked; it was clear we had a complementary skill set,” says deQuilettes. “We started working together, with Anthony coming up with beautiful designs to integrate multiple measurements, and Brandon creating boards to control all of the hardware, including different types of lasers. We started filing multiple patents and that was when we saw it all coming together.”

“We knew from the start that metrology could vastly improve not just materials, but production yields,” says Troupe. Adds deQuilettes, “Our goal was getting to the highest performance orders of magnitude faster than it would ordinarily take, so we developed tools that would not just be useful for research labs but for manufacturing lines to give live feedback on quality.”

The device Optigon designed for industry is the size of a football, “with sensor packages crammed into a tiny form factor, taking measurements as material flows directly underneath,” says Motes. “We have also thought carefully about ways to make interaction with this tool as seamless and, dare I say, as enjoyable as possible, streaming data to both a dashboard an operator can watch and to a custom database.”

Photovoltaics is just the start

The company may have already found its market niche. “A research group paid us to use our in-house prototype because they have such a burning need to get these sorts of measurements,” says Troupe, and according to Motes, “Potential customers ask us if they can buy the system now.” deQuilettes says, “Our hope is that we become the de facto company for doing any sort of characterization metrology in the United States and beyond.”

Challenges lie ahead for Optigon: product launches, full-scale manufacturing, technical assistance, and sales. Greentown Labs offers support, as does MIT’s own rich community of solar researchers and entrepreneurs. But the founders are already thinking about next phases.

“We are not limiting ourselves to the photovoltaics area,” says deQuilettes. “We’re planning on working in other clean energy materials such as batteries and fuel cells.”

That’s because the team wants to make the maximum impact on the climate challenge. “We’ve thought a lot about the potential our tools will have on reducing carbon emissions, and we’ve done a really in-depth analysis looking at how our system can increase production yields of solar panels and other energy technologies, reducing materials and energy wasted in conventional optimization,” deQuilettes says. “If we look across all these sectors, we can expect to offset about 1,000 million metric tons of CO₂ [carbon dioxide] per year in the not-too-distant future.”

The team has written scale into its business plan. “We want to be the key enabler for bringing these new energy technologies to market,” says Motes. “We envision being deployed on every manufacturing line making these types of materials. It’s our goal to walk around and know that if we see a solar panel deployed, there’s a pretty high likelihood that it will be one we measured at some point.”

© Photo: Natalie Hill/Greentown Labs

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

The idea of powering civilization from gigantic solar plants in orbit is older than any space program, but despite seven decades of rocket science, the concept—to gather near-constant sunlight tens of thousands of kilometers above the equator, beam it to Earth as microwaves, and convert it to electricity—still remains tantalizingly over the horizon. Several recently published deep-dive analyses commissioned by NASA and the European Space Agency have thrown cold water on the hope that space solar power could affordably generate many gigawatts of clean energy in the near future. And yet the dream lives on.

The dream achieved a kind of lift-off in January 2023. That’s when SSPD-1, a solar space-power demonstrator satellite carrying a bevy of new technologies designed at the California Institute of Technology, blasted into low Earth orbit for a year-long mission. Mindful of concerns about the technical feasibility of robotic in-space assembly of satellites, each an order of magnitude larger than the International Space Station, the Caltech team has been looking at very different approaches to space solar power.

For an update on what the SSPD-1 mission achieved and how it will shape future concepts for space solar-power satellites, IEEE Spectrum spoke with Ali Hajimiri, an IEEE Fellow, professor of electrical engineering at Caltech, and codirector of the school’s space-based solar power project. The interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

SSPD-1 flew with several different testbeds. Let’s start with the MAPLE (Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment) testbed for wireless power transmission: When you and your team went up on the roof of your building on campus in May 2023 and aimed your antennas to where the satellite was passing over, did your equipment pick up actual power being beamed down or just a diagnostic signal?

Ali Hajimiri is the codirector of Caltech’s space-based solar power project.Caltech

Ali Hajimiri: I would call it a detection. The primary purpose of the MAPLE experiment was to demonstrate wireless energy transfer in space using flexible, lightweight structures and also standard CMOS integrated circuits. On one side are the antennas that transmit the power, and on the flip side are our custom CMOS chips that are part of the power-transfer electronics. The point of these things is to be very lightweight, to reduce the cost of launch into space, and to be very flexible for storage and deployment, because we want to wrap it and unwrap it like a sail.

I see—wrap them up to fit inside a rocket and then unwrap and stretch them flat once they are released into orbit.

Hajimiri: MAPLE’s primary objective was to demonstrate that these flimsy-looking arrays and CMOS integrated circuits can operate in space. And not only that, but that they can steer wireless energy transfer to different targets in space, different receivers. And by energy transfer I mean net power out at the receiver side. We did demonstrate power transfer in space, and we made a lot of measurements. We are writing up the details now and will publish those results.

The second part of this experiment—really a stretch goal—was to demonstrate that ability to point the beam to the right place on Earth and see whether we picked up the expected power levels. Now, the larger the transmission array is in space, the greater the ability to focus the energy to a smaller spot on the ground.

Right, because diffraction of the beam limits the size of the spot, as a function of the transmitter size and the frequency of the microwaves.

Hajimiri: Yes. The array we had in space for MAPLE was very small. As a result, the transmitter spread the power over a very large area. So we captured a very small fraction of the energy—that’s why I call it a detection; it was not net positive power. But we measured it. We wanted to see: Do we get what we predict from our calculations? And we found it was in the right range of power levels we expected from an experiment like that.

So, comparable in power to the signals that come down in standard communication satellite operations.

Hajimiri: But done using this flexible, lightweight system—that’s what makes it better. You can imagine developing the next generation of communication satellites or space-based sensors being built with these to make the system significantly cheaper and lighter and easier to deploy. The satellites used now for Starlink and Kuiper—they work great, but they are bulky and heavy. With this technology for the next generation, you could deploy hundreds of them with a very small and much cheaper launch. It could lead to a much more effective Internet in the sky.

Tell me about ALBA, the experiment on the mission that tested 32 different and novel kinds of photovoltaic solar cells to see how they perform in space. What were the key takeaways?

Hajimiri: My Caltech colleague Harry Atwater led that experiment. What works best on Earth is not necessarily what works best in space. In space there is a lot of radiation damage, and they were able to measure degradation rates over months. On the other hand, there is no water vapor in space, no air oxidation, which is good for materials like perovskites that have problems with those things. So Harry and his team are exploring the trade-offs and developing a lot of new cells that are much cheaper and lighter: Cells made with thin films of perovskites or semiconductors like gallium arsenide, cells that use quantum dots, or use waveguides or other optics to concentrate the light. Many of these cells show very large promise. Very thin layers of gallium arsenide, in particular, seem very conducive to making cells that are lightweight but very high performance and much lower in cost because they need very little semiconductor material.

Many of the design concepts for solar-power satellites, including one your group published in a 2022 preprint, incorporate concentrators to reduce the amount of photovoltaic area and mass needed.

Hajimiri: A challenge with that design is the rather narrow acceptance angle: Things have to be aligned just right so that the focused sunlight hits the cell properly. That’s one of the reasons we’ve pulled away from that approach and moved toward a flat design.

A view from inside MAPLE: On the right is the array of flexible microwave power transmitters, and on the left are receivers they transmit that power to.Caltech

There are some other major differences between the Caltech power satellite design and the other concepts out there. For example, the other designs I’ve seen would use microwaves in the Wi-Fi range, between 2 and 6 gigahertz, because cheap components are available for those frequencies. But yours is at 10 GHz?

Hajimiri: Exactly—and it’s a major advantage because when you double the frequency, the size of the systems in space and on the ground go down by a factor of four. We can do that basically because we build our own microchips and have a lot of capabilities in millimeter-wave circuit design. We’ve actually demonstrated some of these flexible panels that work at 28 GHz.

And your design avoids the need for robots to do major assembly of components in space?

Hajimiri: Our idea is to deploy a fleet of these sail-like structures that then all fly in close formation. They are not attached to each other. That translates to a major cost reduction. Each one of them has little thrusters on the edges, and it contains internal sensors that let it measure its own shape as it flies and then correct the phase of its transmission accordingly. Each would also track its own position relative to the neighbors and its angle to the sun.

From your perspective as an electrical engineer, what are the really hard problems still to be solved?

Hajimiri: Time synchronization between all parts of the transmitter array is incredibly crucial and one of the most interesting challenges for the future.

Because the transmitter is a phased array, each of the million little antennas in the array has to synchronize precisely with the phase of its neighbors in order to steer the beam onto the receiver station on the ground.

Hajimiri: Right. To give you a sense of the level of timing precision that we need across an array like this: We have to reduce phase noise and timing jitter to just a few picoseconds across the entire kilometer-wide transmitter. In the lab, we do that with wires of precise length or optical fibers that feed into CMOS chips with photodiodes built into them. We have some ideas about how to do that wirelessly, but we have no delusions: This is a long journey.

What other challenges loom large?

Hajimiri: The enormous scale of the system and the new manufacturing infrastructure needed to make it is very different from anything humanity has ever built. If I were to rank the challenges, I would put getting the will, resources, and mindshare behind a project of this magnitude as number one.

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

The study reveals new insights on how to make high-efficiency perovskite solar cells, and also provides new directions for engineers working to bring these solar cells to the commercial marketplace. The work is described today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by Dane deQuilettes, a recent MIT postdoc who is now co-founder and chief science officer of the MIT spinout Optigon, along with MIT professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi, and 10 others at MIT and in Washington state, the U.K., and Korea.

“Ten years ago, if you had asked us what would be the ultimate solution to the rapid development of solar technologies, the answer would have been something that works as well as silicon but whose manufacturing is much simpler,” Bulovic says. “And before we knew it, the field of perovskite photovoltaics appeared. They were as efficient as silicon, and they were as easy to paint on as it is to paint on a piece of paper. The result was tremendous excitement in the field.”

Nonetheless, “there are some significant technical challenges of handling and managing this material in ways we’ve never done before,” he says. But the promise is so great that many hundreds of researchers around the world have been working on this technology. The new study looks at a very small but key detail: how to “passivate” the material’s surface, changing its properties in such a way that the perovskite no longer degrades so rapidly or loses efficiency.

“The key is identifying the chemistry of the interfaces, the place where the perovskite meets other materials,” Bulovic says, referring to the places where different materials are stacked next to perovskite in order to facilitate the flow of current through the device.

Engineers have developed methods for passivation, for example by using a solution that creates a thin passivating coating. But they’ve lacked a detailed understanding of how this process works — which is essential to make further progress in finding better coatings. The new study “addressed the ability to passivate those interfaces and elucidate the physics and science behind why this passivation works as well as it does,” Bulovic says.

The team used some of the most powerful instruments available at laboratories around the world to observe the interfaces between the perovskite layer and other materials, and how they develop, in unprecedented detail. This close examination of the passivation coating process and its effects resulted in “the clearest roadmap as of yet of what we can do to fine-tune the energy alignment at the interfaces of perovskites and neighboring materials,” and thus improve their overall performance, Bulovic says.

While the bulk of a perovskite material is in the form of a perfectly ordered crystalline lattice of atoms, this order breaks down at the surface. There may be extra atoms sticking out or vacancies where atoms are missing, and these defects cause losses in the material’s efficiency. That’s where the need for passivation comes in.

“This paper is essentially revealing a guidebook for how to tune surfaces, where a lot of these defects are, to make sure that energy is not lost at surfaces,” deQuilettes says. “It’s a really big discovery for the field,” he says. “This is the first paper that demonstrates how to systematically control and engineer surface fields in perovskites.”

The common passivation method is to bathe the surface in a solution of a salt called hexylammonium bromide, a technique developed at MIT several years ago by Jason Jungwan Yoo PhD ’20, who is a co-author of this paper, that led to multiple new world-record efficiencies. By doing that “you form a very thin layer on top of your defective surface, and that thin layer actually passivates a lot of the defects really well,” deQuilettes says. “And then the bromine, which is part of the salt, actually penetrates into the three-dimensional layer in a controllable way.” That penetration helps to prevent electrons from losing energy to defects at the surface.

These two effects, produced by a single processing step, produces the two beneficial changes simultaneously. “It’s really beautiful because usually you need to do that in two steps,” deQuilettes says.

The passivation reduces the energy loss of electrons at the surface after they have been knocked loose by sunlight. These losses reduce the overall efficiency of the conversion of sunlight to electricity, so reducing the losses boosts the net efficiency of the cells.

That could rapidly lead to improvements in the materials’ efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, he says. The recent efficiency records for a single perovskite layer, several of them set at MIT, have ranged from about 24 to 26 percent, while the maximum theoretical efficiency that could be reached is about 30 percent, according to deQuilettes.

An increase of a few percent may not sound like much, but in the solar photovoltaic industry such improvements are highly sought after. “In the silicon photovoltaic industry, if you’re gaining half of a percent in efficiency, that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars on the global market,” he says. A recent shift in silicon cell design, essentially adding a thin passivating layer and changing the doping profile, provides an efficiency gain of about half of a percent. As a result, “the whole industry is shifting and rapidly trying to push to get there.” The overall efficiency of silicon solar cells has only seen very small incremental improvements for the last 30 years, he says.

The record efficiencies for perovskites have mostly been set in controlled laboratory settings with small postage-stamp-size samples of the material. “Translating a record efficiency to commercial scale takes a long time,” deQuilettes says. “Another big hope is that with this understanding, people will be able to better engineer large areas to have these passivating effects.”

There are hundreds of different kinds of passivating salts and many different kinds of perovskites, so the basic understanding of the passivation process provided by this new work could help guide researchers to find even better combinations of materials, the researchers suggest. “There are so many different ways you could engineer the materials,” he says.

“I think we are on the doorstep of the first practical demonstrations of perovskites in the commercial applications,” Bulovic says. “And those first applications will be a far cry from what we’ll be able to do a few years from now.” He adds that perovskites “should not be seen as a displacement of silicon photovoltaics. It should be seen as an augmentation — yet another way to bring about more rapid deployment of solar electricity.”

“A lot of progress has been made in the last two years on finding surface treatments that improve perovskite solar cells,” says Michael McGehee, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado who was not associated with this research. “A lot of the research has been empirical with the mechanisms behind the improvements not being fully understood. This detailed study shows that treatments can not only passivate defects, but can also create a surface field that repels carriers that should be collected at the other side of the device. This understanding might help further improve the interfaces.”

The team included researchers at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, Cambridge University, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. The work was supported by the Tata Trust, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

© Photo: Courtesy of the researchers