As a society, our history has seen a ton of achievements, and yet the thing which makes human beings so special is how we still continue to get better every single day. This growth-centric pledge, on its part, has empowered the world to clock some huge milestones, with technology emerging as quite a major member of the group. The reason why we hold technology in such a high regard is, by and large, predicated upon its skill-set, which guided us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look beyond the surface for a second, it will become abundantly clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired from the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component, in fact, did a lot to give the creation, and as a result, initiate a full-blown tech revolution. Of course, this revolution eventually scaled up the human experience through some outright unique avenues, but even after achieving a feat so notable; technology will somehow continue to bring forth the right goods. The same has turned more and more evident in recent times, and assuming one new discovery ends up with the desired impact, it will only put that trend on a higher pedestal moving forward.

The researching team at Stanford University has successfully developed a new method, which is meant to enhance the brightness and efficiency of perovskite LED lights and their cheaper alternatives in PeLEDs. Before we talk about the stated method in a bit more detail, we must acknowledge the limitations of current LED and PeLED technology. Starting with the former, LEDs transform electrical energy into light by passing electric current through a specialized semiconductor. However, this semiconductor is actually something very complex and expensive to manufacture. Now, PeLEDs do solve that problem, considering they use a semiconductor known as metal halide perovskite. One can easily grow crystals of this perovskite on glass substrates and save some sizeable money, but PeLED’s undoing is the fact that they fizzle out after just a few hours. Furthermore, they have also seemed largely unable to match the energy efficiency of a standard LED due to random gaps in the perovskite’s atomic structure known as defects.

“There should be an atom here, but there’s not,” said Dan Congreve, assistant professor of electrical engineering and senior author on the paper. “Energy goes in there, but you don’t get light out, so it harms the overall efficiency of the device.”

Enter the method in focus. As many energy-wasting gaps in perovskites occur where atoms of lead ought to be, the researchers replaced 30% of the perovskite’s lead with manganese atoms to help fill those gaps. The move would more than double PeLEDs’ brightness, improve efficiency by almost three times, and extend the lights’ lifespan from being less than one minute to 37 minutes. Beyond performance, the new method is also understood to be better for your health. This is because it runs on a type of lead that isn’t water soluble, meaning it cannot leak through a cracked surface and harm anyone.

“Lead is extremely important for light emission within this material, but at the same time, lead is known to be toxic,” said Sebastian Fernández, a Ph.D. student in Congreve’s lab and one of the involved researchers. “People are skeptical of commercial technology that is toxic, so that also pushed me to consider other materials.”

While the whole development was already quite impressive, it went up a notch when the researchers mixed a phosphine oxide called TFPPO into the perovskite. This instantly made the lights five times more energy-efficient than those with only a manganese boost and brought out one of the brightest glows of any PeLED yet recorded. Unfortunately, TFPPO also caused the lights to drop to half their peak brightness in just two and a half minutes.

For the future, the team will likely experiment with different phosphine oxide additives and see whether they yield different effects, and if they do, the focus will be dedicated to understanding the factors that make up their reaction. Furthermore, the researchers will also focus on other limitations of PeLEDs, such as their difficulty with producing violet and ultraviolet light. Here, some initial tests have indicated that by mixing water to the solution in which the perovskite crystals form, we can produce PeLEDs well-equipped to give out bright violet light five times more efficiently.

“Clearly, this additive is incredible in terms of efficiency,” Fernández says. “However, its effects on stability need to be suppressed to have any hope to commercialize this material.”