Previously, solar cells made out of silicon had high efficiency but high prices too. Moreover, solar cells made out of other materials had low efficiency so it was meaningless to produce them. Finding an inexpensive, efficient material has been a hot issue among scientists.
Using former technology, a high temperature was required during the process of making metal oxides into an auxiliary layer . Professor Taewu Lee (MSE) and his team developed an technology called “self-organized hole extraction layer  (SOHEL)”. On the thin film of the surface of the hole extraction layer, it can regulate polymer composition by itself. Therefore, it eradicates the loss of energy caused after the solar cell absorbs light. This technology will also be useful in other science fields .
Prof. Lee, Gyeonggeun Lim (Ph. D. candidate), and Jinyeong Kim (UNIST) published their findings in Advanced Materials, which is a prominent journal for material science and engineering. They used a new polymer auxiliary layer to advance organic metal “halite perovskite” solar cells. It has a relatively high efficiency with low price so mass production of solar cells is now considered possible.