Los Alamos Press Highlights

Large, high-quality crystals boost Perovskite performance

Millimeter-scale perovskite with promising charge transport properties. Science photo

One way to make bigger and better perovskite solar cells could be making bigger and better perovskite crystals, according to three new studies.

Aditya D. Mohite and Hsing-Lin Wang of Los Alamos National Laboratory, created polycrystalline perovskite films with millimeter-sized grains. Solar cells based on the films achieved 18% power conversion efficiency (Science 2015, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa0472).

“What we have is a fantastic material,” says Mohite, one of the Los Alamos team’s leaders. “I think everyone will be tempted to work with it.” (Full Story)

New technique for growing high-efficiency perovskite solar cells

Aditya Mohite, left, and Wanyi Nie. LANL photo

This week in the journal Science, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers reveal a new solution-based hot-casting technique that allows growth of highly efficient solar cells from large-area perovskite crystals.

"These perovskite crystals offer promising routes for developing low-cost, solar-based, clean global energy solutions for the future," said Aditya Mohite, the Los Alamos scientist leading the project. (Full Story)

Los Alamos discovers super efficient solar using Perovskite crystals

State-of-the-art photovoltaics using high-purity, large-area, wafer-scale single-crystallinesemiconductors grown by sophisticated, high temperature crystal-growth processes offer promising routes for developing low-cost, solar-based cleanglobal energy solutions for the future. Solar cells composed of the recently discovered material organic-inorganic perovskites offer the efficiency of silicon, yet suffer from a variety of deficiencies limiting the commercial viability of perovskite photovoltaic technology. (See Video)

The Cobweb

New Yorker illustration

Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand. (Full Story)

Supporting biosurveillance via the web

A new online resource, called the Biosurveillance Gateway, is in place at Los Alamos National Laboratory, providing a centralized portal for all news, information, resources, and research related to biosurveillance at the laboratory.

"The goal of the site is to support global disease surveillance, providing useful tools developed at Los Alamos for professionals around the world to reference from a single location," said Alina Deshpande, the project's leader. (Full Story)

Nowcasting: Disease monitoring at Internet speed

GCN illustration    

Do you search the Internet to diagnose your aches and pains? Turns out enough people do that scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have discovered they can more effectively monitor and forecast diseases by analyzing views of Wikipedia articles, according to a team from the laboratory.

The findings add to growing evidence that, “traditional, biologically-focused monitoring techniques are accurate but costly and slow,” and that new models based on social media data and Internet search – or nowcasting  – are emerging to take their place. (Full Story)

Is social media the new Doppler radar for tracking diseases?

Common cold map. from HIT             

When someone is sick, they want to know what’s wrong. It’s not unusual for individuals to turn to Wikipedia for more information about their diagnosis, looking up key search terms in a pursuit of a better understanding. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are using that human tendency to search for answers as a foundation to predict outbreaks of influenza, Dengue fever and more. (Full Story)


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