Next years PV is expected to become one of the dominant electricity sources at world level, and this will be accompanied by a massive penetration of PV devices and systems in everyday life environments. These challenging expectations are supported by the impressive R+D advances achieved in different solar cell technologies. This has included not only mature industrial Si technologies but also new thin film chalcogenide technologies already at industrial stage and emerging device technologies with string potential for sustainable mass deployment as kesterites as well as new challenging perovskites with very high efficient potential. Third generation device concepts using III-V technologies have already demonstrated their potential for breaking the Shockley-Queisser single junction limit, achieving challenging efficiency values. At a more fundamental level, new materials with strong potential for developing next generation devices are being identified, as novel inorganic perovskites and wide band gap chalcogenides.
This Symposium will provide a suitable discussion platform bringing together scientists from different fields and research competences involving materials and devices modelling, solid state physics, chemistry and engineering to review and identify new material and device concepts coming from different solar cell technologies. The symposium aims to facilitate the exploration of the potential transfer of innovative solutions developed for the different materials and device technologies, benefiting from the cross-fertilisation between the several approaches proposed for the different kinds of compounds and analysing the extension of device concepts initially designed for other technologies
- Solar cell architectures based on selective contacts
- Implementing thin film technologies in tandem devices: going beyond SC limit at low costs
- Ultrathin device architectures: improvement of electron and photon management
- New device architectures with added functionalities: semi-transparent devices for energy efficient buildings
- New device architectures with added functionalities: towards flexible ultra-light devices
- Thermophotovoltaic device concepts: combining thermal and light harvesting
- New absorbers for next generation devices
Alejandro Pérez-Rodríguez is Full Professor of Electronics at the University of Barcelona (UB). Since October 2009 he is ascribed to IREC as Head of the Solar Energy Materials and Systems (SEMS) Group. His research activities are centred in the development and advanced characterisation of cost-efficient thin film emerging inorganic technologies, using processes compatible with their industrial sustainable upscaling with very low environmental impact. Special emphasis in these activities is given to the exploitation of the technological flexibility of these technologies for advanced PV integration applications, including the development of flexible solar cells and innovative efficient transparent contacts for next generation semi-transparent devices specially suited for Building Integration and Agrivoltaics. He is co-author of 413 scientific publications, including 329 papers in SCI high IF journals, with an h-factor of 58 and 11322 citations (with a consolidated average of 802 citations/year during the last 6 years) (Scopus January 2025). He is co-author of 6 patents, including a patent that was under exploitation by the former company Smalle Technologies SL (spin-off of the UB) and 3 patents shared with NEXCIS (former spin-off of EDF in France).
Guy Brammertz graduated in 1999 from the University of Liège (Belgium) in Applied Physics. In 2003 he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Twente (The Netherlands) defending a thesis about his work on superconducting Josephson junction photon detectors carried out for the European Space Agency. He then joined imec in 2004, where he first was involved in the LogicDram program aiming at the fabrication of Ge and III-V 35 nm gate length MOS transistors for CMOS applications. His work focused on electrical and optical characterization as well as passivation of electrical defects at Ge and III-V/oxide interfaces. In 2011 he joined the imec photovoltaic program, where he is now working on the fabrication and characterization of thin film solar cells based on Cu(In,Ga)(S,Se)2 (CIGS), Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 (CZTS) and Cu2ZnGe(S,Se)4 (CZGS) absorbers.
Manfred EichSeigo Ito received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo (Japan), with a thesis that was the first to discuss Graetzel-type dye-sensitized solar cells in Japan. He worked in the Laboratory of Professor Shozo Yanagida (Osaka University, Japan) for two years, and in the Laboratory of Professor Michael Graetzel, at the Swiss federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne as a postdoctoral scientist for over three years, where his efforts focused on the progress of high-efficiency dye-sensitized solar cells. He is currently professor at University of Hyogo, making new printable cost-effective solar cells.
Luis Pazos OutonMarcel Placidi