Tuesday 16 October 2018, 17:00 - 18:00 (followed by a drinks reception)
Small Lecture Theatre, Poynting Building, (R13 on the campus map), University of Birmingham
Metal halide perovskites are exotic hybrid crystalline materials developed out of curiosity. Unexpectedly, photovoltaic (PV) devices and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) incorporating these perovskites are rapidly emerging as serious contenders to rival the leading technologies. PV power conversion efficiencies have jumped from 3% to over 23% in just seven years of academic research, now exceeding the performance of commercial thin film technologies, and we are witnessing a similarly astonishing pace in LEDs.
During this lecture, Dr Sam Stranks will give an overview of this exciting nascent technology, including a historical overview of the developments and potential. He will focus on some of their key breakthroughs using laser spectroscopy to understand the behaviour of energised electrons in perovskite thin films and the operation of the state-of-the-art solar and light-emitting devices. Dr Stranks will also show how his group are tracking the energised charges defects on extremely short length and fast time scales as they lose their energy to heat upon collisions with defects, and he will identify avenues towards eliminating these power losses. Understanding these processes is key to further development of the field and to bringing the perovskite technology to commercialisation.
About Dr Sam Stranks
Dr Sam Stranks is a Royal Society University Research Fellow, TED Fellow, Principal Investigator at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He completed his PhD as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, receiving the 2012 Institute of Physics Roy Thesis Prize for his work on carbon nantoube/polymer blends for organic solar cell applications. He then turned his attention to halide perovskites as a post-doctoral researcher in Henry Snaith’s group at Oxford University, before commencing a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2016, he established his research group in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, which focuses on the optical and electronic properties of emerging semiconductors towards low-cost, transformative electronics applications including photovoltaics and lighting.
For his pioneering work in the perovskite field, Sam received the 2016 IUPAP Young Scientist in Semiconductor Physics Prize, the 2017 Early Career Prize by the European Physical Society and the 2018 Henry Moseley Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics. In 2017, he was named by MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 under 35 innovators in Europe and was listed by Clarivate Analytics as the seventh most influential researchers in the world through his highly cited papers.
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