Perovskite Solar Cells in the Public Domain as the Community Gears Up for Technical Advances
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The results are analyzed in terms of a keyword network (Figure 1). Besides technical aspects, it suffices to note that larger nodes with thicker connections are the most relevant ones.3 It is interesting to observe that the “perovskite network” has become increasingly complex in just a few years. In 2013, among the main keywords were “advance”, “conversion”, and “technology”. In 2016, the weight and connections of “stable”, “commercial”, “silicon”, and “cheaper” indicate that social media users are paying increasing attention to the commercialization of perovskite solar cells as an economically viable technology.
etal-halide perovskites have seen the fastest rise in power conversion efficiency ever witnessed by any photovoltaic technology. To cite a recent conversation we had with Michael Grätzel, a major player in the perovskite field, the efficiency increase was a “meteoric rise to 22% f rom a little bit over 3% in just a few years” and “a kind of gold rush.”1 Along with the increase in efficiency, several outstanding perovskite properties have been brought to light with specialized experiments and simulations. These efforts in turn have provided the scientific basis to the explore underlying principles of solar cell efficiency. As thin-film fabrication methods are being streamlined, the intrinsic limit of optoelectronic properties are now being explored also for other applications. For example, the reported values of carrier diffusion length, which plays a central role in solar cell devices allowing efficient charge collection at selective contacts, steadily increased over time to current values of several micrometers. These surprising results were the topic of debate at major scientific forums. The ongoing discussions also highlighted how the peculiar lead−halide combination gives rise to a unique set of material properties (e.g., defect tolerance, spin−orbit and Rashba effects, large polarons, hot carriers, etc.) that are likely at the heart of the perovskite success. Considering the most recent literature, a great deal of interest has been shown in achieving device stability and developing fabrication techniques suited for efficient, stable, and scalable solar cell production. This natural evolution of the field indicates the potential impact of perovskite solar cells in the broad energy field.2 As one might expect, scientific discussions on any specialized topic are usually confined to researchers working in the corresponding field. These discussions seldom are presented for consumption by the public. Perovskite solar cells, on the other hand, are becoming popular beyond the domain of the specialized scientific community. Analyzing the recent literature on perovskite solar cells, I found a paper by Li et al. on “Twitter Data Mining for the Social Awareness of Emerging Technologies”.3 The researchers used “perovskite solar cells” as a test case keyword to check the public awareness toward new and emerging technologies. Social media are an obvious source of data to probe the social awareness of a technology, and they are heavily mined to search for possible new topics to be commercially exploited. The authors scrutinized a large database of tweets from 2013 to the end of 2016, and they established statistical connections with different keywords used in the same tweets. This analysis prompted 1020 tweets in the investigated period, with a typical exponential temporal distribution of their frequency, similar to “perovskite solar cells” paper citations. © 2018 American Chemical Society
In reality, mere comparative study does not represent a significant technical or scientific advance. Hence, it is important that the claims made in the study are reasonable and truly connected to an improved fabrication strategy or have a real prospect of being scaled up. Notably, this evolution in public awareness, as inferred from social media, reflects exactly the evolution of the field that I have perceived as a scientist and as an editor. Based on this analysis, one could predict perovskites will make their way to the market, sooner or later, and it is rewarding to see scientific work perceived as potentially relevant also outside the (sometimes self-referencing) scientific community. The evolution of papers submitted to ACS Energy Letters also reflects this trend. Because of the increasing number of technical papers we are getting (probably this is the same trend of all perovskite-publishing journals), we would like to present some guidelines for the submission of these papers. A properly composed manuscript highlighting the key advances or overcoming certain experimental limitations is likely to be well-received in ACS Energy Letters. The majority of the technical papers we receive now are simply referred to as novel (large area) deposition methods for solar cell fabrication. Often researchers of these papers claim that their method or procedure is better than those reported by other researchers. In reality, such claims are hard to verify, and mere comparative study does not represent a significant technical or scientific advance. Hence, it is important that the claims made in the study are reasonable and truly connected to an improved fabrication strategy or have a real prospect of being scaled up. As the Journal continues to increase its visibility and impact in the scientific community, we expect to see a significant Published: April 13, 2018 890
DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.8b00403 ACS Energy Lett. 2018, 3, 890−891
Editorial
Cite This: ACS Energy Lett. 2018, 3, 890−891
ACS Energy Letters
Editorial
Figure 1. Social awareness network related to perovskite solar cell technology in 2013 (top) and in 2016 (bottom). Blue (red) nodes refer to nouns (adjectives). Reprinted with permission from ref 3. (2) Ono, L. K.; Park, N.-G.; Zhu, K.; Huang, W.; Qi, Y. Perovskite Solar Cells - Towards Commercialization. ACS Energy Lett. 2017, 2, 1749−1751. (3) Li, X.; Xie, Q.; Huang, L.; Yuan, Z. Twitter Data Mining for the Social Awareness of Emerging Technologies. 2017 Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), Portland, OR, 2017; pp 1−10.
increase in submissions in the coming months. We hope that this Editorial will help Authors to compose scientific and technical papers with a clear energy focus and provide a broader appeal. We look forward to provide quick and effective editorial processing so that the work gets well-deserved attention in the scientific community.
Filippo De Angelis, Senior Editor
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Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie Molecolari del CNR, 06123 Perugia, Italy
AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Filippo De Angelis: 0000-0003-3833-1975 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS. The author declares no competing financial interest.
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REFERENCES
(1) De Angelis, F.; Kamat, P. A conversation with Michael Grätzel. ACS Energy Lett. 2017, 2, 1674−1676. 891
DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.8b00403 ACS Energy Lett. 2018, 3, 890−891
