Thin Film Chalcogenide Photovoltaic Materials - 2024

The Thin Film Chalcogenide Photovoltaic Materials symposium 2024 will follow the previous editions (Spring Meetings) with a focus on Cu(In,Ga)Se2, Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4, CdTe, Sb-based chalcogenides, chalcogenide perovskites and new chalcogenide based materials for energy applications. The symposium provides a platform for researchers in the domains of absorber synthesis, characterization, and modelling. Thereby the symposium fosters discussions to push the understanding and ultimately the power conversion efficiency of chalcogenide-based PV. The chalcogenide community needs to meet physically next year, and we believe that the E-MRS is the right venue for that.

Proceedings:

In collaboration with JPhys Energy, the symposium organizers have launched a focus issue. The collection aims to explore the pivotal role of chalcogenide-based materials in advancing green, carbon-neutral energy production on a large scale. We invite you all to submit your works to the collection. Deadline for submissions is the 28th of February 2025. All papers will be subject to IOPP's rigorous peer-review process. The full scope and details are available on the collection homepage: https://iopscience.iop.org/collections/jpenergy-240802-628

Special sessions:

The Symposium is proud to announce two special sessions organized in collaboration with the Horizon Europe projects Hi-BITS and SITA. We strive to promote discussions and exchanges on current hot topics within the chalcogenide community. The special sessions will offer a combination of presentations from project partners and from researchers working on the same topic.

The special sessions will take place on Tuesday 17th September afternoon:

• On 17.09 at 13:45: Session A07 "Passivated back contacts", together with the Horizon Europe project Hi-BITS,
• On 17.09 at 16:00: Session A08 "Transparent back contacts and wide gap chalcogenides", together with the Horizon Europe project SITA.

Scope:

Chalcogenide based materials will play an important role in the transition to a green carbon neutral energy production on massive scales. These direct bandgap semiconductors exhibit low manufacturing costs, high material utilization and reduced energy payback time. They can be processed on flexible substrates and are robust against typical environmental operation conditions such as heat and moisture. Some material systems, such as CdTe and CIGSe are available on the market with record efficiencies exceeding 22% in the laboratory and above 20% in modules. Other emerging chalcogenide-based materials, amongst others kesterites, Sb-based chalcogenides, chalcogenide perovskites are currently studied extensively as absorbers for single and multijunction devices.
One of the most important property of these materials systems is the tuneability of the optoelectronic properties. This allows researchers to develop dedicated material combinations that allow for efficient tandem and multijunction devices, thereby paving the way to surpass traditional single junction devices and ultimately break the Shockley-Queisser limit for chalcogenide based thin film PV.
This symposium aims to provide a platform to present and discuss fundamental research across the various material systems, to improve the understanding of these very complex materials and develop mitigation strategies to surpass the current bottlenecks of the individual technologies. The symposium aims to bridge the gap from fundamental semiconductor science to improvements in device performance. The symposium thereby brings together scientists from various disciplines and technologies to discuss improvements in absorber opto-electronic properties, interface passivation strategies, novel concepts such as multijunction devices, micro-solar cells and concentrator photovoltaics and improved concepts for modeling.
The chalcogenide symposium has a long tradition over the last decades to attract scientists from all over the world to present their best science at E-MRS. It has often been one of the largest symposia at the E-MRS conference, surpassing 200 participants. The symposium consists of invited, contributing talks, posters and discussion sessions. Furthermore, a young scientist tutorial has been organized regularly to promote discussions among young researchers in the field. We plan a similar structure for E-MRS 2024.

Hot topics to be covered by the symposium:

• Chalcogenide PV materials, theory and modellin
• Sustainable PV materials and processes
• Novel and alloyed chalcogenide materials
• First-principle to device numerical simulations
• Thin film growth, theory and experimental aspects
• Defects, grain boundaries and alkali elements in chalcogenide-based PV materials
• Heterostructures, buffer and charge extraction layers
• Charge selective contacts, interface passivation
• Material and electrical characterization methods
• Research related to upscaling and manufacturing, diagnostic tools
• Chalcogenide-based solar cells for multi-junction e.g. tandem devices
• Advanced light management concepts
• Novel device concepts and architectures
• Beyond PV: Chalcogenide materials for photocatalysis, photo-electrochemistry (PEC) and PVdriven electrolysis (PV-EC) systems for water splitting, CO2 reduction or ammonia synthesis