Research

SOPHY is the acronym of the project “The role of Softness in the Physics of Defects: Probing Buried Interfaces in Perovskites Optoelectronic Devices”

SOPHY will develop the tools and knowledge to probe optoelectronic processes at buried interfaces, in devices, at operating conditions, delivering a long-time pursued target in many fields of nanotechnology.

Semiconducting metal halide perovskites, and devices based on them, will be the primary technology under investigation, given its potential to represent the merging point between the efficient inorganic and the chameleonic organic electronics.

In this class of materials, defects are sensitive to the device operating conditions, thus, the control of structure-properties relationship, especially at interfaces, becomes elusive, and the prediction of device operation, necessary to engineer reliable systems, is not possible without an “in vivo” approach.

SOPHY addresses the above challenge combining spectroscopic investigations, material synthesis and processing, devices fabrication & characterization.

The success of the research program will go through the achievement of three main targets, each of them with the potential of producing breakthroughs:

• the understanding of the role of structural deformations in determining the defectiveness of pristine perovskites and how this is linked to their fundamental optoelectronic properties, in particular to the nature of carriers and their dynamics;
• the realization of an experimental tool which will map in space, with a resolution below 50nm, electronic structures and their excitations, and how they evolve in time over a timescale from fs to microsecond. A wide set of cascade phenomena will be follow as charge transfer and localization, band bending and Fermi level equalization, in time and space at buried interfaces in operating devices;
• modelling, for the first time, perovskite based diodes, being able to take into account the structural and energetic transformations each interface – from a molecular to a mesoscopic level – will undergo during operation as a consequence of the intrinsic defectiveness of this class of materials.

ERC Consolidator Grant number: 771528