PhD in Chemical and Materials Sciences

Materials in optoelectronic applications for energy generation

Frontiers in Materials Science

Academic year 2021/2022

Sommario del corso

• Learning assessment methods
• Program
• Suggested textbooks and readings
• Notes
• Teaching tools

Learning assessment methods

Presentation exam

At the end of this course, students will give a presentation on recently published relevant works either individually or in a group (more details like presentation time will be noticed at the beginning of this course).

Presentation must cover following aspects:

1. Background:
   - A short summary of the previous main results in that field
   - A motivation and hypothesis established and tested in the work.
2. A description of the methodology and results
3. Criticism:
   - Significance of the result and impact on that field
   - Any misconception, any missing scientific results, any inconsistency or flaw in the hypothesis and results.
4. Outlook

Program

Semiconductor materials are useful because their electronic behavior can be tuned by the deliberate addition of impurities, called doping and their band gap broadly ranging from 0.5 eV to 4.0 eV can be used for various optoelectronic device applications. This course will start by fundamentals on intrinsic semiconductor physics to answer fundamental questions how many charge carriers are present and how fast they move in semiconductor materials. Then, doping and formation of junctions e.g. the metal-semiconductor junction and the pn junction, made of two pieces of the same semiconductor with two different doping types (pand n), which is essential for optoelectronic devices like solar cells will be studied in brief.

Then the course will move on materials in optoelectronic applications, for instance crystalline silicon, organometallic hybrid perovskite, layered hybrid perovskite, and etc. In parallel, a variety of designs and configurations of the devices including conventional pn junction solar cell, dye-sensitized solar cells, organometallic halide solar cells, and tandem solar cells will be covered. Additionally, recent work on organic semiconductors for photoelectrochemical application e.g. water splitting will be shortly introduced.

The last section of the course will face the main techniques for the characterization of solar devices with a specific attention of (photo)electrochemical ones and to clarify the relationship between device efficiency and semiconductor properties.

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Note

Timetable

9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18 november from 12 to 14
In presence (room D1) and in streaming

• Teaching materials
• Exams and finals
• Go to Moodle
• Visit the forums