Publication date: 11th March 2026
Many of the key properties of photoactive and semiconducting perovskite devices have origins in the microstructure of the perovskite absorber layer, and obtaining analytical results from this layer is therefore a key aim in the further development of perovskite devices. While it is possible to create perovskite films with grain sizes in the micrometres, most high-performance perovskite devices rely on films with grain sizes of an order of a few hundred nanometres, well below the diffraction limit of most conventional visible light-based microscopes and associated techniques. As such, it has been necessary to develop other microscopy techniques that are able to collect spatial and analytical information with nanometre precision. This includes various electron microscopy techniques, scanning probes, like atomic force microscopy (AFM) and associated techniques, such as Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM), conductive AFM (c-AFM), and infrared AFM (IR-AFM), as well as high-resolution confocal scanning microscopes.
In this talk, I will show applications of various microscopy techniques for the study of metal halide perovskites. This includes how electron microscopy can distinguish phases that other diffraction-based techniques cannot,[1] and how changes in the atomic structure caused by altering the precursor chemistry leads to changes in the surface potential, which can be observed using KPFM. The distribution of various polymer additives can also be observed through a combination of c-AFM, KPFM, IR-AFM, and TEM,[2] showing that most polymer additives tend to aggregate at grain boundaries, where they change the surface potential of the material, effectively inducing barriers for ion migration at the grain boundaries. Finally, I will show how highly localised IV-curves can be obtained using conductive AFM, which enables the study of phase segregation and its inhibition with nanometre resolution, using a technique which can be generalised to study any IV-related property of a device under various operating conditions.
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