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Photonics

Chemistry In Pictures

Chemistry in Pictures: Megaperovskites

by Craig Bettenhausen
February 11, 2021

A red rectangular crystal the size of a person's hand.
Credit: Endre Horváth/Adv. Sci. 2020, DOI: 10.1002/advs.202001882
Credit: Adv. Sci. 2020, DOI: 10.1002/advs.202001882

Everybody loves a giant crystal. Pavao Andričević, László Forró, Márton Kollár, Endre Horváth and coworkers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne made this 1,000 cm3 perovskite monster with a method they call oriented crystal‐crystal intergrowth. In a process that doesn’t seem like it should work, they grow a set of smaller crystals, line them up juuuuuuust right, and then use a technique called inverse temperature crystallization to fuse them together. The team prepared the methylammonium lead tribromide (MAPbBr3) crystal shown, which has a mass of 3.3 kg, for use in a γ‐ray detector. “It is also worth mentioning,” the researchers write, “that, in principle, there are no technological limitations to further exceed these impressive crystal sizes in the future.”

Credit: Endre Horváth/Adv. Sci. 2020, DOI: 10.1002/advs.202001882

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