A few years ago, scientists used nanowires from perovskite to make solar cells. The reason behind this was because nanowires are cheaper compared to nanoparticles, and are supposed to be more efficient in theory since they supposedly provide a direct conductive highway to transmit current.
However back then, it only achieved a solar efficiency rating of 3.8%. However fast forward to today, a team from the Ecole polytechnicique federale de Lausanne in Switzerland have managed to boost the efficiency to 21%, thanks to a standardized way of creating those nanowires.
As to how this was done, according to the report, “Using nanofluidic channels in an automated way, the researchers were able to produce tens of thousands of parallel nanowires on a silicon surface. The growth process was visualized in real-time with a simple optical microscope, which shed light into the crystal growth mechanism.”
The researchers are calling this a great leap forward in nanowire technology, although we guess you shouldn’t expect that it will be widely adopted, at least not anytime soon as further testing and refining of the process needs to be done. That being said, apart from the use in solar cells, the technology can also be applied to lasers, LEDs, and light detectors.