Symposium Sessions

Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

Optoelectronic devices – including a wide variety of solar cells, smart windows, light emitting diodes, but also photoelectrochemical cells for solar-driven fuel generation – have become increasingly important in our society. These devices are also driving important innovations in materials and device architectures to enable multiple functionalities. In these optoelectronic devices, contacts and interfaces between two adjacent layers are taking a dominant role in their performance. Indeed, for many of these applications, modern contacts increasingly need to fulfill 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 or exhibiting anti-reflective properties. 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, 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 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. We will 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 charge transport and extraction layers.
• Functional transparent conducting oxides (TCO) and transparent electrodes.
• Buffer layer and contact passivation for solar cells and light emitting devices (CIGS, hybrid perovskites, silicon, CdTe, organic semiconductors).
• 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, e.g., charge transfer, band bending, and passivation.
• High throughput computational materials prediction and machine learning approaches for design and modeling of contacts and interfaces in optoelectronic devices.

• A tutorial complementing this symposium is tentatively planned.

Invited Speakers:

• Joel Ager (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)
• Marcus Bär (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, Germany)
• Henk Bolink (Universitat de València, Spain)
• Annalisa Bruno (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
• James Bullock (University of Melbourne, Australia)
• Todd Deutsch (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA)
• Steffen Duhm (Soochow University, China)
• Elvira Fortunato (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
• Fan Fu (Empa–Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland)
• Giulia Grancini (Università di Pavia, Italy)
• Robert Hoye (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
• Monica Lira-Cantu (Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, Spain)
• Barry Rand (Princeton University, USA)
• Anna Regoutz (University College London, United Kingdom)
• Thomas Riedl (Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany)
• Dipankar Das Sarma (Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India)
• Laura T. Schelhas (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA)
• Nathanaelle Schneider (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France)
• Adele Tamboli (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA)
• Aron Walsh (Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
• Nadine Witkowski (Sorbonne Université, France)

Symposium Organizers