An organic polymer nano-photocatalyst has been developed for highly efficient light driven proton reduction.

Electrochromic (EC) materials can be integrated in thin-film devices and used for modulating optical transmittance. The technology has recently been implemented in large-area glazing (windows and glass facades) in order to create buildings which combine energy efficiency with good indoor comfort. This critical review describes the basics of EC technology, provides a case study related to EC foils for glass lamination, and discusses a number of future aspects. Ample literature references are given with the object of providing an easy entrance to the burgeoning research field of electrochromics.

Large datasets are now ubiquitous as technology enables higher-throughput experiments, but rarely can a research field truly benefit from the research data generated due to inconsistent formatting, undocumented storage or improper dissemination. Here we extract all the meaningful device data from peer-reviewed papers on metal-halide perovskite solar cells published so far and make them available in a database. We collect data from over 42,400 photovoltaic devices with up to 100 parameters per device. We then develop open-source and accessible procedures to analyse the data, providing examples of insights that can be gleaned from the analysis of a large dataset. The database, graphics and analysis tools are made available to the community and will continue to evolve as an open-source initiative. This approach of extensively capturing the progress of an entire field, including sorting, interactive exploration and graphical representation of the data, will be applicable to many fields in materials science, engineering and biosciences.

Plasmonic structural colors have recently received a lot of attention. For many applications there is a need to actively tune the colors after preparing the nanostructures, preferably with as strong changes in the optical response as possible. However, to date, there is a lack of systematic investigations on how to enhance contrast in electrically induced color modulation. In this work we implement electrochromic films with plasmonic metasurfaces and compare systematically organic and inorganic materials, with the primary aim to maximize brightness and contrast in a reflective color display. We show nanostructures with good chromaticity and high polarization-insensitive reflectivity (∼90%) that are electrochemically stable in a nonaqueous solvent. Methods are evaluated for reliable and uniform electropolymerization of the conductive polymer dimethylpropylenedioxythiophene (PProDOTMe2) on gold. The resulting organic films are well-described by Lambert–Beer formalism, and the highest achievable contrast is easily determined in transmission mode. The optical properties of the inorganic option (WO3) require full Fresnel models due to thin film interference, and the film thickness must be carefully selected in order to maintain the chromaticity of the metasurfaces. Still, the optimized fully inorganic device reaches the highest contrast of approximately 60% reflectivity change for all primary colors. The switching time is about an order of magnitude faster for the organic films (hundreds of ms). The bistability is very long (hours) for the inorganic devices and comparable for the polymers, which makes the power consumption essentially zero for maintaining the same state. Finally, we show that switching of the primary colors in optimized devices (both organic and inorganic) provides almost twice as high brightness and contrast compared to existing reflective display technologies with RGB subpixels created by color filters.

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