Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The long-term objective of this research program is to explore the unique properties of new perovskite-type functional materials and their integration into basic optoelectronic device architectures including solar cells and light-emitting diodes. Perovskites materials offer new and remarkable functional properties (chemical, optical, optoelectronic etc.) and recent progress in their synthesis, manipulation and characterization at the nanoscale opens the way to new discoveries of functional materials and exploitation of their unique properties in several innovative applications. In the last 3 years, perovskites have yielded spectacular results and have generated a lot of attention world-wide as a promising material platform to develop high-performance solar cells produced at low costs. Here, we propose to explore two novel perovskite-type material systems: (1) multiferroic Bi2FeCrO6 oxide and (2) metal-halide perovskite MAGeI3/MA(Bi,In)3. Three key research objectives are essential to succeed in this endeavour: (1) achieve a precise control of the synthesis process and improve the quality of the resulting material systems, (2) explore, understand and control their fundamental properties, and (3) optimize their properties for energy-related applications and integration in basic solar cell (using for example multiferroic Bi2FeCrO6, MAGeI3 and MA(In,Bi)I3) and light-emitting diode architectures (using in particular multiferroic Bi2FeCrO6). As such, the requested financial support will serve to create a challenging and exciting research environment for the training of young researchers, stimulate the advancement of fundamental knowledge, and generate major technological breakthroughs in optoelectronics. In addition to a great societal impact, this program will contribute significantly to position Canada as a leader in emerging energy-related materials and technologies