“Organics strike back”: After a long halt between 2012 and 2015 on efficiencies around 12%, organic solar cells (OSC) have now transitioned to a stage where efficiencies over 18% are being reported. The emergence of a family of materials - the non-fullerene acceptors (NFAs) with small energetic offsets with specific electron donors - is mainly responsible for the remarkable improvement. With the significant milestone of 20% now in sight and an optimistic value of 25% predicted, understanding charge dynamics in these systems is now of great importance . This symposium endeavours to gather leading experts from around the world aiming at critical discussions on hot topics related to charge-and-thermo-dynamics of organic solar cells, in particular those based on non-fullerene acceptors.
- Voltage loss mechanisms in NFA solar cells.
- New thermodynamic efficiency limits.
- Interplay between excitons, CT states and free charges in the low offset systems.
- Charge generation in non-fullerene solar cells.
- Role of kinetics and energetics in charge generation in non-fullerene solar cells.
- Trap induced recombination.
- Charge transport and recombination.
- Thick junctions enabled by reduced recombination.
- Interplay between nano-morphology and charge dynamics.
- Doping engineering in OSCs.
- Role of energetic disorder and tail states.
- New methodologies to investigate charge dynamics in OSCs.
James Durrant is Professor of Photochemistry and Sustainable Energy in the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford, following his previous professorial appointments at Imperial College London and the University of Swansea. His research focuses on the use of transient optical spectroscopies to investigate the function of new materials for sustainable energy conversion, including materials for artificial photosynthesis, photocatalysis, solar cells and electrolysis. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2017 and appointed a CBE for services to photochemistry and solar energy research in 2022.
Justin HodgkissIvan Kassal is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney. He graduated from Stanford University in 2006 and completed his PhD in Chemical Physics at Harvard University in 2010. He is a theorist working at the intersection of quantum science, chemistry, biophysics, and materials science. He pioneered some of the first applications of quantum computers to chemistry, showing they could dramatically accelerate difficult chemical calculations. He has also unravelled ways that photosynthetic organisms use quantum effects to improve their light harvesting, and is using those lessons to better understand next-generation materials, especially organic solar cells. He is a recipient of a DECRA fellowship, a Westpac fellowship, and the Le Fèvre Medal of the Australian Academy of Science for “outstanding basic research in chemistry”.
Prof. Dieter Neher studied physics at the University of Mainz. In 1990 he gained his PhD with Prof. G. Wegner. From 1990-1992 he was a research associate at the Optical Sciences Centre, Tucson, Arizona and at the Centre for Research in Electrooptics and Lasers, Orlando, Florida with Prof. G. Stegeman. 1992 he joined again Prof. G. Wegner at the MPI-P, heading the group Electrooptical Phenomena in Polymers. Following his habilitation in November 1998, he became Professor of Soft Matter Physics at the Institute for Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam. Current research interests are electrical, optical and optoelectronic processes in conjugated materials.