Animation

Polaronic distortions

Animation of polaronic distortions expanding in an atomic lattice

As this animation shows, polaronic distortions start very small and rapidly expand outward in all directions to a diameter of about 5 billionths of a meter, which is about a 50-fold increase. This nudges about 10 layers of atoms slightly outward within a roughly spherical area over the course of tens of picoseconds, or trillionths of a second.

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These fleeting disruptions, seen for the first time in lead hybrid perovskites, may help explain why these materials are exceptionally good at turning sunlight into electrical current in solar cells.

An illustration shows polarons as bubbles of distortion in a perovskite lattice
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