He reveals a study published in Nature Communications on which the researcher also worked UCBM Letizia Chiodo
28 April 2017 - It also bears the name of the Physics of Matter researcher UCBM, Letizia Chiodo, the study published in Nature Communications. which reveals the incredible properties ofanatase, a particular type di Titanium dioxide (TiO2). A discovery that could radically change the way we understand technologies that require the accumulation and use of energy obtained through light.
Il Titanium dioxide is in fact a material involved in numerous practical applications, including the PV , photocatalysis, used in air and water purification processes (it is the mechanism by which, for example, glass surfaces clean themselves when exposed to light). However, it still held many secrets about its electronic and optical properties, despite decades of studies on the mechanisms that induce the absorbed light to convert into electric charges.
Today the international study coordinated byFederal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL), In collaboration with the Max Planck Institute of Hamburg, theUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma and the University of Tor Vergata, revealed that anatase has some particular characteristics compared to many traditional semiconductors such as silicon, the material with which most of the chips for technological devices are produced.
Specifically, when light hits a semiconductor, pairs composed of a negative charge (electron) and a positive one (hole) can be created, called excitons. In the case of anatase, the researchers discovered that, thanks to the crystal structure, the exciton behaves in a particular way: it is in fact very stable, even when the material is reduced to nanometric dimensions and it is sensitive to internal and external stimuli such as temperature, pressure or excess of electrons.
This makes it a promising candidate for the creation of powerful and accurate optical readout sensors, also paving the way for the use of anatase in the excitonics sector, new generation electronics capable of going well beyond the current one in terms of accumulation of energy. But “the scope of the discovery is much broader – he states Letizia Chiodo - so long as Titanium dioxide anatase is a very cheap and easy to manufacture material. For this reason - he concludes - our study opens up interesting possibilities for optimizing current applications, imagining future ones".
