Making a Designer Iron Molecule To make more affordable solar cells, researchers at Sweden’s Lund University are not just trying to be cheap, they are avoiding tightening markets in expensive noble metals like ruthenium, osmium and iridium. A more common metal such as iron, constituting six percent of the earth’s crust, might just be the answer to several issues. One problem keeps it from being a great solar cell component. Iron just doesn’t take a shine to solar radiation. In the careful words of the abstract for the research team’s paper, iron’s shortcoming is exposed. “However, the photoexcitable charge-transfer (CT) states of most Fe complexes are limited by picosecond or sub-picosecond deactivation through low-lying metal centered (MC) states, resulting in …
