PhD student of HZB earns Best Presentation Award of the Young Crystallographers

Frederike Lehmann received a prize for her presentation at the annual conference of the German Society of Crystallography in Leipzig on 28 March 2019. She is doing her doctorate in the Department of Structure and Dynamics of Energy Materials at the HZB under Prof. Dr. Susan Schorr at the Graduate School HyPerCell.

In her lecture she presented her work on hybrid perovskite materials, which are being investigated as an exciting new class of materials for highly efficient solar cells. Hybrid perovskites are semiconductors and have a so-called bandgap in the appropriate energy range, so that the energy-rich blue and green parts of the solar spectrum in particular can be efficiently converted into electricity.

Frederike Lehmann's work deals with the chemical synthesis of hybrid perovskites and the analysis of their properties. She investigates both inorganic (CsPbI₃) and organic perovskites in which organic molecules such as formamidinium or methylammonium are incorporated into the structure instead of cesium. By targeted substitution, she succeeded in producing a high-temperature modification at room temperature whose band gap is particularly suitable for solar cells. This is particularly important because perovskites are used in thin-film solar cells whose quality suffers in high-temperature processes.  The "Best Presentation Award of the Young Crystallographers" is associated with a book voucher.