Event fees TBC – see website for details

The unique format of the Faraday Discussions allows for in-depth discussions and opportunities to establish new collaborations.

This Discussion will focus on the next generation of inorganic thin-film solar cells based on Earth abundant non-toxic materials. The meeting is for all researchers working on inorganic materials for thin-film photovoltaics including established and early-career scientists, post-graduate students and industrial researchers.

Draft Programme now available – see event website for details. Poster submissions deadline 25 April 2022

The Faraday Discussion will be organised into the following themes:

Indium-free CIGS analogues
Cu-based materials have been actively researched in the context of stable materials based on Earth-abundant elements. The so-called ‘substrate’ cell architecture underpinning CIGS technology is suitable for the deposition of a variety of Cu-based materials employing sputtering techniques and solution-based methods followed by reactive annealing. This session will consider developments in this area including absorber materials and buffer layers. One of the key objectives of the Discussion is to assess the performance gap between this class of materials and state-of-the-art CIGS cells.

Novel chalcogenides, pnictides and defect-tolerant semiconductors
This large family of compounds includes chalcogenide perovskites and delafossites, binary chalcogenides, nitrides and halides. Our understanding of the optical and electronic properties of these materials varies considerably, while appropriate device architectures have not been established in many of these cases. This session will cover the latest developments in the area, with strong emphasis on the role of coordination, bonding and the opto-electronic properties of these materials.

Material design: structure and bonding
This session will address guiding principles for screening materials for PV applications. The discussion will mainly consider absorber materials. Other active layers such as buffer and transparent conduction oxides are also within scope.

Bulk and surface characterisation techniques of solar absorbers
This session will discuss contributions of state-of-the-art tools for characterising semiconductor materials and interfaces, including synchrotron X-ray based techniques, photoemission spectroscopy/microscopy, high resolution electron microscopy and scanning probe techniques.

Invited Speakers:

• David Mitzi (Introductory lecture) Duke University, United States
• Aron Walsh (Closing remarks)I mperial College London, United Kingdom
• Mirjana Dimitrievska, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
• Charlotte Platzer-Bjorkman, Uppsala University, Sweden
• Byungha Shin, KAIST, South Korea
• Susanne Siebentritt, Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg
• Jiang Tang, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China
• Thomas Unold, Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, Germany
• Suhuai Wei, Beijing Computational Science Research Center, China
• Alex Zunger, University of Colorado Boulder, United States