Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Contact materials and interface formation play a dominant role in the performance of several optoelectronic devices, such as a wide variety of solar cells, smart windows, light emitting diodes, but also photoelectrochemical cells for solar-driven fuel generation. These devices are also driving important innovations in materials and device architectures to enable desired functionalities. Indeed, for many of these applications, contacts increasingly need to fulfill multiple functions such as surface passivation, carrier collection/injection, lateral conductivity, and forming an effective contact to the outer device terminals, while being as broadband transparent as possible. Additional constraints may be present such as processing compatibility, overall device stability and reliability, cost, and reliance on abundant and non-toxic materials. Overall, material design aided by computational and machine learning methods, precision synthesis, the use of hybrid organic-inorganic materials, interfacial engineering and smart integration of contacts in these devices will open the way to new functionality and improved device efficiency. Together with contact material innovation, novel characterization methods to elucidate the role of the interfaces in device performance will be required to design of the next generation of optoelectronic devices.

The goal of this symposium is to continue the dialogue in a multidisciplinary community of organic and inorganic material and device scientists, physicists, chemists, material modeling and prediction researchers working on optoelectronic materials, interface characterization and devices, to discuss the current and future needs in contacting materials and interfaces, including those used in high-efficiency solar cells based on hybrid halide perovskites, silicon, organic, thin-film and III-V materials.

Topics will include:

• Transparent conductors: transparent conducting oxides (TCO), oxychalcogenides, nitrides, conductive polymers, carbon and metal based nanostructures.
• Inorganic, organic and hybrid materials for charge transport and extraction layers.
• Buffer layer and contact passivation for solar cells and light emitting devices (CIGS, hybrid perovskites, silicon, CdTe, quantum dots, organic).
• Nanomaterials, nanocomposites and 2D materials as interlayers.
• Advanced fabrication processes, damage-free layer growth and post-treatment techniques of nanolayers and thin film contact materials.
• Scalable synthesis and deposition techniques of contact materials (from lab to fab).
• Density functional theory (DFT) and first-principle calculations of optoelectronic materials and interfaces.
• Defect science and stability with respect to external and internal stress factors of contact materials and interfaces.
• Interface engineering and modeling to assess fundamental optoelectronic properties, i.e., charge transfer, band bending, Fermi level pining, and passivation.
• High throughput computational materials prediction and machine learning approaches for design and modeling of contacts and interfaces in optoelectronic devices

Invited Speakers (tentative):

• Mariana Bertonni (Arizona State University, USA)
• Henk Bolink (Universitat de València, Spain)
• Keith Butler (Science and Technology Facilities Council, United Kingdom)
• Julia Hsu (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
• Geoff Hyett (University of Southampton, United Kingdom)
• Ross Kerner (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA)
• Alex Martinson (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
• Julia Medvedeva (Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA)
• Nitin Padture (Brown University, USA)
• Huisheng Peng (Fudan University, China)
• Philip Schulz (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France)
• Byungha Shin (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea)
• Takao Someya (The University of Tokyo, Japan)
• Shuxia Tao (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands)
• Joel Varley (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA)
• Elizabeth von Hauff (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• Lydia Wong (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Symposium Organizers