Call for Papers

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Optoelectronic devices – including a wide variety of solar cells, smart windows, and light emitting devices – have become increasingly important in our society, driving innovations in materials and device architectures to enable multiple functionalities. In these optoelectronic devices, contact materials and interface formation are taking a dominant role in their performance. Indeed, for many of these applications, modern contacts increasingly need to fulfil multiple electrical functions such as surface passivation, carrier collection/injection, lateral conductivity, and 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, and use of abundant and non-toxic materials. Overall, material design aided by computational and machine learning methods, thin film growth and 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 the next generation of optoelectronic devices.

The goal of this symposium is to bring together a multidisciplinary community of physicists, chemists, materials and device scientists 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:

• Inorganic, organic and hybrid materials for electron and hole transport layers (ETL and HTL).
• Passivating contacts and buffer layers for solar cells and light emitting devices (CIGS, hybrid perovskites, silicon, CdTe, organic).
• Transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) and transparent electrodes.
• Multifunctional nanolayers and 2D materials as contact materials.
• Density functional theory (DFT) and first-principle calculations of optoelectronic materials and interfaces.
• Damage-free fabrication and post-treatment techniques of nanolayers and thin film contact materials.
• Scalable synthesis and deposition techniques of contact materials (from lab to fab).
• Thermal, environmental and long-term stability of contact materials and interfaces.
• In-situ, ex-situ and operando characterization of contact materials and interfaces via spectroscopy and microscopy methods (TEM, XPS, UPS, SPM, EXAFS).
• Interface engineering and fundamental understanding of charge transfer, band bending, Fermi level pining, passivation.
• Defects at interfaces, TCOs and contact materials.
• Computational materials prediction and design of contacts in optoelectronic materials.
• Novel approaches in device and interface modeling.

• A tutorial complementing this symposium is tentatively planned.

Invited Speakers:

• Stacey Bent (Stanford University, USA)
• Joseph Berry (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA)
• Maria Chan (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
• Adriana Creatore (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands)
• Geoffroy Hautier (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
• Zachary Holman (Arizona State University, USA)
• Hideo Hosono (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
• Norbert Koch (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
• Jan Anton Koster (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
• Linn Leppert (Universität Bayreuth, Germany)
• Ellen Moons (Karlstads Universitet, Sweden)
• Ulrich Wilhelm Paetzold (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany )
• Nam-Gyu Park (Sungkyunkwan University, Republic of Korea)
• Ted Sargent (University of Toronto, Canada)
• David Scanlon (University College London, United Kingdom)
• Michele Sessolo (Universidad de Valencia, Spain)
• Nicholas Strandwitz (Lehigh University, USA)
• Baoquan Sun (Soochow University, China)
• Hairen Tan (Nanjing University, China)
• Chris van de Walle (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

Symposium Organizers