The emergence of halide perovskites has taken the semiconductor community by storm leading to a plethora of applications utilizing these amazing materials. As the field matures, a number of scientific questions appear, relating to the nature of the structural instabilities and the mechanisms of charge-transport in halide perovskites. Debates relating to the nature of chemical bonding or the contribution of the phonons to the optoelectronic properties are heating up and answering these questions requires a multidisciplinary effort. Key questions asking whether the superb semiconducting properties of the lead-based APbX3 perovskites are limited to the lead metal alone or whether there are other – preferably less toxic – metal halide-based materials with similar optoelectronic properties. The scope of the symposium is to cover the latest discoveries in these directions, but it also provides an open forum for discussing alternative classes of non-perovskitic halide-based materials and unconventional theoretical concepts. The present symposium has the ambition of blending together researchers working on materials design, from synthesis to crystal growth, spectroscopy and theory.
- Development of new halide-based materials
- Crystal growth of halide semiconductors
- Lead-free halide perovskite semiconductors
- Structure-property relationships
- Excitons in metal halides
- Electron-phonon coupling
- Metal halides in optoelectronics
Jacky Even was born in Rennes, France, in 1964. He received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Paris VI, Paris, France, in 1992. He was a Research and Teaching Assistant with the University of Rennes I, Rennes, from 1992 to 1999. He has been a Full Professor of optoelectronics with the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées, Rennes,since 1999. He was the head of the Materials and Nanotechnology from 2006 to 2009, and Director of Education of Insa Rennes from 2010 to 2012. He created the FOTON Laboratory Simulation Group in 1999. His main field of activity is the theoretical study of the electronic, optical, and nonlinear properties of semiconductor QW and QD structures, hybrid perovskite materials, and the simulation of optoelectronic and photovoltaic devices. He is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
Claudine Katan (born Hoerner) received her Ph.D. in physics (nonlinear optics) from the University of Strasbourg (ULP), France in 1992. She subsequently served as a lecturer in physics at the University of Rennes (UR1), France, before being appointed as a CNRS Research Investigator in the Physics Department at Rennes in 1993. Until 2003, her research interests concerned the properties of molecular charge-transfer crystals and the topology of electron densities mainly through approaches based on density functional theory (e.g. the CP-PAW code by P. E. Blöchl, IBM-Zurich). She then joined the Chemistry Department at Rennes and turned her research interests toward the structural, electronic and linear/nonlinear optical properties of molecular and supramolecular chromophores using various theoretical approaches—from modeling to state-of-the-art electronic structure calculations (e.g. CEO methodology by S. Tretiak, LANL) . Since the end of 2010, her research has also been devoted to 3D and 2D crystalline materials of the family of halide perovskites based on solid-state physics concepts. Overall, her theoretical work is closely related to the experimental research developed in-house and through international collaboratorations.
Nicolas Mercier (Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry, 1994 -Le Mans-) is Professor at the University of Angers (France). His major interests is the synthesis, crystallography, and structure−property relationships of organic-inorganic materials including coordination complexes/polymers and hybrid perovskites (HP). He started working in the field of HP in 2002, showing the key role of organic cations to tune the band gap of 2D HPs and the potential of such hybrids in the field of SHG switchable materials and in the field of ferroelectrics. Recently, he has discovered a new family of lead and iodide deficient hybrid perovskites (3D d-HP) for PSC and PeLED applications.
Ursula Rothlisberger was born in Switzerland and obtained her diploma in Physical Chemistry from the University of Bern. She earned her Ph.D. degree at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in R�schlikon. From 1992�1995, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow, first at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (USA) and then at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Physics in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1996, she moved as a Profile 2 Fellow of the National Science Foundation to the ETH in Zurich. One year later, she became Assistant Professor of Computer-Aided Inorganic Chemistry at the ETH Zurich, and in 2002 she accepted a call for a position as Associate Professor at the �cole Polytechnique F�d�rale de Lausanne (EPFL). Since 2009, she has been working as a full Professor in Computational Chemistry and Biochemistry at the EPFL. In 2001, she received the Ruzicka Prize, and in 2005, the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC) awarded her the Dirac Medal for "the outstanding computational chemist in the world under the age of 40". Ursula Rothlisberger is an expert in the field of density functional based mixed quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical molecular dynamics simulations in the ground and electronically excited states. She has published more than 200 original publications in peer-reviewed journals and various review articles in specialized journals and as book chapters.
Alex earned his Ph.D. in physics of semiconductors from Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine for his work on electronic properties of nitride semiconductor alloys.
In 2004 he joined the Quantum Semiconductors and Bionanophotonics lab at University of Sherbrooke as a postdoc, working on theoretical modeling of laser-assisted quantum well intermixing and self-assembly processes of organic monolayers on metal and semiconductor surfaces for applications in bio-sensing.
In 2008 he moved to Quantum Theory Group at National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, where he worked on many-body problems in epitaxial and colloidal semiconductor and graphene quantum dots; in particular, simulations of multi-exciton generation, Auger processes and optical properties of nanocrystals used in hybrid polymer-semiconductor solar cells.
Alex joined Ted Sargent’s Nanomaterials for Energy Group in 2011 and worked on characterization and modeling of the semiconductor nanocrystal surfaces and developing the synthesis methods for nanomaterials with improved optical and transport properties for photovoltaics.
In 2018, Alex joined the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences at the University of Toronto, Scarborough as an Assistant Professor in Clean Energy. His topics of interest are materials for energy storage and novel materials discovery using high-throughput experiments and machine learning.
Omer Yaffe is a senior scientist (assistant professor) at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
He investigates the structure-function relationship in functional materials such as semiconductors, ionic-conductors, and ferroelectrics. Specifically, he is interested in phenomena that stems from strongly anharmonic atomic displacements in solids.
He earned his Bachelor's degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering (dual-program) at Ben Gurion University in 2005, followed by a master’s degree in chemical engineering. In 2013, he earned a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute followed by a postdoctoral term at Columbia University, New York.
Dr. Yanfa Yan has held the Ohio Research Scholar Chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Toledo, USA since 2011 and is a faculty member in the Ohio's Wright Center for Photovoltaics Innovation and Commercialization (PVIC). Previously, he was a Principal Scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), USA. Dr. Yan's expertise includes theoretical study of electronic properties and defect physics of semiconductors and nano scale characterization of microstructures, interfaces, and defects in thin-film photovoltaic materials. Dr. Yan is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.