On June 13, the leading international journal Nature Communications published online the article "Hydrogenated Cs₂AgBiBr₆ for significantly improved efficiency of lead-free inorganic double perovskite solar cell", a collaborative research conducted by Professor Manling Sui and Associate Professor Yue Lu from the Faculty of Materials and Manufacturing of Beijing University of Technology (BJUT), and Professor Suhuai Wei from Beijing Computational Science Research Center. BJUT is the primary research institution of the paper. Zeyu Zhang, a doctoral candidate from BJUT's Faculty of Materials and Manufacturing, is the first author. The research was granted by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the High-Level Innovation Team Construction Program of Beijing Municipally Governed Universities and Colleges, and the National Key R&D Program of China.

Recently, the development of lead-free inorganic double perovskite material, such as Cs₂AgBiBr₆, has been of great importance in solving toxicity and instability issues associated with traditional lead halide perovskite solar cells. However, due to the wide indirect bandgap of Cs₂AgBiBr₆ film, its light absorption ability is largely limited and the photoelectronic conversion efficiency is normally low. The team led by Manling Sui and Yue Lu creatively applied a hydrogenation method to the Cs₂AgBiBr₆ material, and succeeded in significantly reducing its bandgap. By using the hydrogenated Cs₂AgBiBr₆ perovskite material as the light absorption layer of solar cell, the photoelectric conversion efficiency was greatly improved, reaching the highest photoelectric conversion efficiency in Cs₂AgBiBr₆ perovskite solar cell system. Meanwhile, hydrogenated Cs₂AgBiBr₆ perovskite solar cell also showed good environmental stability. The team has provided an insightful strategy for the fabrication of high-performance lead-free inorganic perovskite solar cells, which offers a very promising prospect for market application.