Colorimetric Screening for High-Throughput Discovery of Light Absorbers

High-throughput screening is a powerful approach for identifying new functional materials in unexplored material spaces. With library synthesis capable of producing 10⁵ to 10⁶ samples per day, methods for material screening at rates greater than 1 Hz must be developed. For the discovery of new solar light absorbers, this throughput cannot be attained using standard instrumentation. Screening certain properties, such as the bandgap, are of interest only for phase pure materials, which comprise a small fraction of the samples in a typical solid-state material library. We demonstrate the utility of colorimetric screening based on processing photoscanned images of combinatorial libraries to quickly identify distinct phase regions, isolate samples with desired bandgap, and qualitatively identify samples that are suitable for complementary measurements. Using multiple quaternary oxide libraries containing thousands of materials, we compare colorimetric screening and UV–vis spectroscopy results, demonstrating successful identification of compounds with bandgap suitable for solar applications.