Doctoral school on materials chemistry and physics

These lectures, jointly organized between the department of solid state sciences and the department of chemistry will give our students the chance to explore the broad and interdisciplinary field in which our research is situated.

 All lectures are also free to attend by other interested staff, and we believe that attending them and contributing to the discussions afterwards will also help to strengthen the ties between the  researchers within and between our departments.

These lectures count as a doctoral schools specialist course for all PhD students and will be given between October 2022 and June 2023. 

Program 2nd semester

The next session of our doctoral schools course will take place on Tuesday afternoon.

The program will be as follows:

May 7th:  Characterization of nanomaterials

Lecture room 3.3, S1 building, 3rd floor, at 14:00 

• Greg Greczynski (Linköping University)

Introduction to X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy

The purpose of this lecture is to give an in-depth introduction to the most commonly used analytical method for elemental and chemical analysis of the near-surface region, namely X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS or ESCA). The aim is that students will develop a comprehensive understanding of theoretical and practical aspects involved, learn about the possibilities and limitations of the technique, and be able to understand and interpret results obtained with XPS.

• Quentin Pankhurst (University College London)

Verification and Validation - What it is, and What it means for Materials Characterisation

Sometimes materials characterisation is an exercise in exploration or discovery, but many times it is a means of making sure that a substance is what you think it is, or at least hope it to be. When one is manufacturing a materials-based product, the characterisation step becomes an important part of the “verification and validation” (V&V) procedure that is performed under a quality management system, without which regulatory approval for marketing may not be granted. In this lecture the speaker will discuss some aspects of V&V with reference to his experiences in commercialising nanomaterials as medical devices for the staging and treatment of cancer and other pathological conditions. He will also address the role of international standards in the process, and describe what it takes to write new standards where the existing ones are just not suitable - as in the case of magnetic nanoparticles.

May 23rd: Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD): a versatile conformal thin film deposition method with atomic-level control for next-generation PV devices

• Nathanaelle Schneider (CNRS)

Photovoltaics are growing rapidly (+30-40% installed volume per year) and are facing many challenges (new usages, 4 to 8 TW capacity by 2050). Hence, academic and industrial communities are developing innovative solar cell architectures involving new materials and interfaces. To build such complicated devices, it is necessary to be able to synthesize nanomaterials with a fine control of the composition, thickness and morphology, under constrained conditions.

In this context, ALD (Atomic Layer Deposition) has emerged as a powerful tool because of its unique advantages that I will illustrate with examples in perovskite (PSC) solar cells. Being a gas-phase deposition method based on sequential, self-limiting surface reactions, it allows the preparation at low temperature and on large areas, of pinhole-free conformal thin-films with excellent reproducibility, accurate and simple control of thickness and material properties. Though PSC have reached very high efficiency levels, it is also accompanied by concerns on long-term stability and open questions about up scaled manufacturing. Innovative ALD-charge transport and encapsulation layers can contribute to circumvent those issues. All these pave the way toward efficient semi-transparent, flexible and/or tandem systems.