The new technique hinges on a counterintuitive insight about how perovskites crystallize. By adding a mixture of zinc bromide and methyl ammonium chloride early in the fabrication process, the researchers discovered they could dramatically reduce the number of defects that form in the crystal structure as the material solidifies. The consequences of that seemingly small intervention are striking. In defect-free perovskites produced this way, electrons retain the excess energy they absorb from sunlight roughly ten times longer than in untreated material. According to Dane deQuilettes, assistant professor at Princeton and a senior author on the paper, the improvement could translate into a one percent gain in power generation even for the most cutting-edge perovskite solar cells already in existence — a meaningful margin in a field where incremental gains are fiercely contested.

To understand why those microseconds matter, it helps to grasp what actually happens inside a working solar cell. When sunlight strikes a semiconductor, photons transfer their energy to electrons, lifting them into an excited state. The whole point of a photovoltaic device is to harvest that excess energy as electricity before the electrons relax back down and release it as heat. Defects in the crystal lattice act like traps along this pathway, snaring excited electrons and squandering their energy before it can be collected. The longer electrons can hold onto their excess energy — a property measured in microseconds in these experiments — the more opportunities there are to extract useful power. In deQuilettes’ measurements, electrons in the treated perovskites retained their energy for up to 300 microseconds, roughly a hundred thousand times longer than in many other semiconductors.

The discovery itself was born of serendipity. A few years ago, Jason Yoo, a first author on the paper who was then a researcher at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, noticed that his samples were behaving in ways he could not explain. He reached out to deQuilettes, whose laboratory specializes in developing tools to probe how electrons behave and interact inside perovskites. “He told me the samples were behaving like nothing he had seen before,” deQuilettes recalled. “He asked if I could help study them.” What deQuilettes found when he examined the samples amazed him: the extraordinary carrier lifetimes that would eventually form the basis of the Science paper.

The chemistry behind the breakthrough is as subtle as it is effective. The key, deQuilettes explained, is that the two added chemicals — zinc bromide and methyl ammonium chloride — must have a lower melting point when combined than either does alone, much as adding salt to ice lowers its freezing point. Such mixtures are known as eutectics, and the paper’s title, “Volatile eutectics to tailor crystallization for perovskite optoelectronics,” reflects this principle. By introducing a volatile eutectic during the early stages of fabrication, the researchers changed the way the perovskite crystal grows, steering it toward a more ordered lattice with fewer of the atomic-scale imperfections that plague conventionally processed films. “We opened up this new class of chemical mixtures that improve the performance of perovskites,” deQuilettes said.

The broader context makes the advance especially significant. Most solar cells installed around the world today are made of silicon, a material prized for its durability but constrained by its physics and its energy-intensive manufacturing. Perovskites, by contrast, can be prepared from liquid precursors and printed in sheets, like ink on newsprint, potentially making them cheaper and more sustainable to produce at scale. Increasingly, the two technologies are being combined rather than competing: a thin coat of perovskite layered over a silicon solar cell forms a tandem device that generates about 40 percent more power than a cell made from either material alone. The catch has always been that the printing and layering process tends to introduce those damaging atomic-level defects, blunting the perovskite layer’s contribution. Fewer defects mean a more efficient perovskite layer, which in turn means more efficient tandem modules rolling off future production lines.

The timing could hardly be more pointed. Global electricity demand is climbing rapidly, driven in no small part by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and the datacenter infrastructure that underpins it. “The whole solar industry has been asking, what are the next set of technologies that are going to contribute to energy production?” deQuilettes noted. A one percent improvement in power conversion may sound modest, but in the economics of utility-scale solar — where installations span thousands of acres and margins are measured in fractions of a cent per kilowatt-hour — even single-digit percentage gains compound into substantial additional generating capacity. And because the improvement is achieved through chemistry during fabrication rather than through expensive post-processing, it is the kind of change that manufacturers could in principle adopt without redesigning their entire production workflow.

Perhaps the most intriguing implications reach beyond photovoltaics altogether. Because electrons in the treated perovskite persist in their excited state for hundreds of microseconds — an eternity by semiconductor standards — the material opens possibilities that conventional semiconductors simply cannot offer. “Energy is living in the material for so long, it broadens what’s actually possible with a semiconductor,” deQuilettes said. Long carrier lifetimes are coveted not only in solar cells but in a range of optoelectronic applications, from light-emitting devices to photodetectors and potentially quantum technologies, where the ability of a material to hold onto excitation energy determines what device architectures are feasible. The researchers emphasize that the discovery has raised more questions than it has answered. “It’s been really eye-opening,” deQuilettes added, suggesting that the eutectic approach may be only the first entry in what could become a broad family of defect-mitigating chemical mixtures.

The study was a genuinely international effort. In addition to deQuilettes at Princeton and Yoo and Bong Joo Kang at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, the author list spans Connor J. Dolan, Zhewen J.D. Deng, Jack R. Palmer, Kelly X. Vences and David P. Fenning at the University of California-San Diego; Seongsik Nam, Jinho Lee, Kyu Min Kang, Daesoo Kim, Jang Hee Cho, Donghyuk Chung and Seong Sik Shin at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea; Rushik Desai and Arun Mannodi-Kanakkithodi at Purdue University; Niranjana Mohan Kumar, Mariana I. Bertoni and Arkita Chakrabarti at Arizona State University; Yanqi Luo, Barry Lai, Zhonghou Cai, Martin V. Holt and Tao Zhou at Argonne National Laboratory; Andrew M. Kiss at Brookhaven National Laboratory; and In Sun Cho at Ajou University and Dong Hyun Kim and Jun Hong Noh at Korea University. That breadth of expertise — spanning synthesis, ultrafast spectroscopy, synchrotron characterization and computational modeling — reflects the multidisciplinary challenge of understanding and controlling defects at the atomic scale.

For a field that has weathered its share of hype and hard lessons, the new result offers something refreshingly concrete: a reproducible chemical strategy, published in a peer-reviewed journal, that measurably extends carrier lifetimes by an order of magnitude and points toward real gains in device performance. Perovskites have always been crystals of extraordinary promise; the challenge has been coaxing that promise out of an imperfect lattice. With volatile eutectics now shown to tailor crystallization in a way that suppresses defects at their source, researchers have a new tool — and a new class of chemistry to explore — in the long effort to build better solar technology, one crystal at a time.

Subject of Research: Defect mitigation in perovskite solar cells using volatile eutectic chemical additives during fabrication

Article Title: Building better solar tech, a crystal at a time

Article References: Building better solar tech, a crystal at a time. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: perovskite, solar cells, crystal defects, eutectics, photovoltaics, tandem solar cells, semiconductors, carrier lifetime, zinc bromide, methyl ammonium chloride, Princeton University, Science journal

NY Creates, the Albany-based New York Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering, and Science, has announced its participation in the newly funded Manufacturable and Resilient superconducting QUantum Information Systems, or MARQUIS, Quantum Leap Challenge Institute. The institute is a flagship program of the U.S. National Science Foundation and is led by Princeton University. According to the agency, MARQUIS is receiving $27.9 million in NSF funding over five years, and NY Creates will receive approximately $1.25 million of that total to support research, technology scaling, and workforce development activities aimed at advancing quantum computing technologies.

The central obstacle MARQUIS confronts is one that has shadowed superconducting quantum computing since its earliest days: the materials and fabrication techniques underpinning today’s qubits have barely evolved in decades. Nathalie de Leon, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University and director of the new institute, described the problem bluntly. “The whole community has been using essentially the same materials technology for about a quarter century,” she said. “That technology has worked well for experimental prototypes and small-scale systems. But to build quantum computers at a scientifically useful scale, the most basic elements must be reinvented.” She added that having a few key experts in the field who know what the right waypoints are and how to think about it is really crucial.

Understanding why this reinvention is necessary requires a brief look at how superconducting quantum computers work. At the heart of these machines are qubits, the quantum analogues of the bits in classical computing. Unlike ordinary bits, which must be either zero or one, qubits can exist in superpositions of both states simultaneously, and they can become entangled with one another in ways that allow certain calculations to be performed with dramatically fewer resources than classical machines would require. Superconducting qubits, the approach pursued by MARQUIS, rely on tiny electrical circuits cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, where resistance vanishes and quantum effects dominate. These circuits incorporate Josephson junctions, nanoscale sandwich structures of superconducting materials separated by insulating barriers, which act as the nonlinear elements that make quantum computation possible.

The trouble is that these junctions and the materials surrounding them are exquisitely sensitive. Microscopic defects, impurities, and inconsistencies introduced during fabrication can cause decoherence, the process by which fragile quantum states leak information to their environment and collapse into useless classical noise. As researchers scale from processors with dozens or hundreds of qubits to the thousands or millions needed for scientifically and commercially meaningful computation, the variability of fabrication becomes an increasingly punishing bottleneck. A process that works acceptably for a handful of devices in a university cleanroom may fail catastrophically when applied across an entire wafer of thousands of components.

This is precisely where NY Creates brings distinctive value to the consortium. The organization operates advanced 300-millimeter semiconductor research and development infrastructure, the wafer format that dominates industrial chip manufacturing worldwide. As part of MARQUIS, the NY Creates team, led by Dr. Satyavolu Papa Rao, Senior Director of Emerging Technologies and Research at the organization, will work with institute partners to test innovative materials and processes at the 300-millimeter wafer scale, targeting mid-scale superconducting quantum processors. Working at wafer scale means that new materials and fabrication recipes can be evaluated under conditions that closely resemble real industrial production, rather than the small-batch conditions typical of academic laboratories.

“Creates is uniquely positioned to help bridge the gap between breakthrough quantum research and scalable manufacturing,” Papa Rao said. “Through our advanced 300mm semiconductor R&D infrastructure and deep industry partnerships, we will work alongside MARQUIS collaborators to evaluate, translate, and scale promising quantum materials and processes, helping to accelerate the development of manufacturable quantum technologies while strengthening the nation’s quantum workforce and semiconductor innovation ecosystem.”

Beyond testing new materials, the NY Creates team will collaborate with MARQUIS researchers to identify critical data and process insights that could improve the scalability of materials and fabrication approaches for quantum devices within industry-standard CMOS-compatible manufacturing environments. CMOS, the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology that underpins virtually all modern electronics, represents the gold standard for manufacturability. Ensuring that quantum device innovations remain compatible with CMOS-style processes is a strategic bet: it means that whatever succeeds in the laboratory has a plausible path into the enormous existing infrastructure of the semiconductor industry, rather than requiring an entirely new fabrication ecosystem to be built from scratch.

The institute’s ambitions extend well beyond fabrication alone. NY Creates will also support MARQUIS efforts to develop databases of materials, processes, and device structures that can help researchers better understand the factors influencing quantum device performance, decoherence, and process variability. Such databases could prove transformative for the field, which has historically relied on scattered, hard-to-compare experimental results. Systematic, shared data on how specific material combinations and processing steps affect qubit coherence times and yield would allow researchers to iterate far more quickly, applying the kind of data-driven optimization that revolutionized classical semiconductor development over past decades.

Workforce development forms a third pillar of NY Creates’ contribution, and it addresses a widely recognized vulnerability in the American quantum enterprise. The quantum industry is growing faster than the supply of people trained to work in it, and the specialized skills required, spanning quantum physics, cryogenic engineering, materials science, and precision fabrication, are scarce. Through MARQUIS, NY Creates will work with institute partners to expand opportunities for students and postdoctoral researchers to gain hands-on experience with advanced semiconductor manufacturing environments through periodic site visits and collaborative learning experiences. The goal is to cultivate a generation of scientists, engineers, and technologists who are equally comfortable with quantum theory and with the practical realities of high-volume chip fabrication.

The breadth of the consortium reflects the scale of the challenge. The Princeton-led MARQUIS institute brings together researchers from Princeton University, Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Santa Barbara, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, NY Creates, Michigan State University, and the University of Iowa. These institutions contribute expertise across materials science, quantum devices, and semiconductor processing, spanning two dozen laboratories in total. The initiative is further supported by an advisory board that includes representatives from Google Quantum AI, NVIDIA, Applied Materials, Oxford Instruments, Bluefors, KU Leuven/imec, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a lineup that spans the leading quantum computing companies, the dominant suppliers of semiconductor fabrication equipment, and the major providers of cryogenic systems essential to superconducting quantum hardware.

Dave Anderson, President and CEO of NY Creates, framed the award as a milestone for both the organization and the region. “This award reflects the growing importance of integrating world-class semiconductor manufacturing expertise with leading-edge quantum research,” Anderson said. “As a partner in this exceptional consortium of leading universities, industry partners, and research institutions, Creates will help advance technologies that are critical to the future of quantum computing and America’s scientific and economic competitiveness. The MARQUIS initiative also reinforces New York’s leadership in semiconductor innovation while creating valuable opportunities to educate and train the next generation of scientists, engineers, and technologists who will drive quantum-based economic growth.”

The stakes for the United States are considerable. Quantum computing is widely viewed as a strategic technology, one with potential implications for national security, pharmaceutical development, financial modeling, and materials design. Nations around the world, including China and members of the European Union, have committed billions of dollars to quantum research and development, and leadership in the field is increasingly seen as inseparable from broader economic and technological competitiveness. By pairing the fundamental scientific expertise of its leading universities with the manufacturing know-how embedded in organizations like NY Creates, the MARQUIS institute represents a deliberate attempt to ensure that American quantum discoveries do not stall at the prototype stage but instead flow into scalable, domestic production.

MARQUIS is one of several Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes established by the National Science Foundation as part of a broader federal push in quantum science, and it embodies a philosophy that is gaining traction across the field: the bottleneck to useful quantum computers is no longer only a matter of physics but also of engineering discipline, manufacturing rigor, and human capital. If the institute succeeds in reinventing the basic elements of superconducting qubits and embedding them in CMOS-compatible, wafer-scale processes, the consequences could ripple far beyond the laboratory. Quantum processors that can be fabricated reliably, in quantity, and with predictable performance would move the field decisively closer to the day when quantum machines tackle problems no classical computer ever could, and the groundwork for that transition is now being laid, one wafer at a time, in Albany and its partner institutions across the country.

Subject of Research: Manufacturable superconducting quantum computing hardware and fabrication

Article Title: NY Creates joins Princeton-led NSF Quantum Institute to advance next-generation quantum computing

Article References: NY Creates joins Princeton-led NSF Quantum Institute to advance next-generation quantum computing. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: quantum computing, superconducting qubits, MARQUIS, National Science Foundation, Princeton University, NY Creates, semiconductor manufacturing, 300mm wafer, CMOS compatibility, decoherence, workforce development, Josephson junctions