Press Release
Polish Radio: Versatile applications of perovskites. Breakthrough discovery in photonics
This article first appeared in polish radio as an interview with Michał Matuszewski, PI in quondensate.
Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, in collaboration with the Institute of Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Centre for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and other institutions from Italy, Iceland and Australia, have made a breakthrough discovery in photonics. The team demonstrated novel methods for creating perovskite crystals with precisely defined shapes that can be used in photonic technology as waveguides, couplers, splitters and modulators.
The use of perovskites in photonics
Perovskites are a group of minerals that occur both in nature and can be grown under laboratory conditions. – They are a very broad class of minerals and are characterised by a certain arrangement of atoms in the crystal lattice,’ Professor Michał Matuszewski of the Institute of Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences tells Polish Radio Programme 1. – They are materials that interact excellently with light and that is why, among other things, they are promising in terms of their potential application in solar cells,’ he stresses.
- As far as our work is concerned, we have focused not exactly on solar cells, but on another application of perovskites for signal processing, namely to build optical chips in which to process information. (…) We live in an era where we have a whole lot of information on the internet, we have to process it in very large quantities. This is also combined with the application of artificial intelligence, which is slowly entering our lives,’ he adds.
Novel methods for creating perovskite crystals
A team of researchers has demonstrated novel methods for creating perovskite crystals with precisely defined shapes that can be used in photonic technology as waveguides, couplers, splitters and modulators. The findings, published in the prestigious journal Nature Materials, also present advances in edge lasing.
– This is the discovery of scientists from the University of Warsaw and our other collaborators, and it involves the development of a novel method for creating optical structures in the form of miniature optical fibres on the order of nanometres in size, which can be used precisely for information processing. It turns out that by developing this method and self-crystallisation, we obtain extremely high quality optical fibres with which we can transmit light,’ explains the expert.
