Please join the Chemistry Department for a seminar with Asaph Widmer-Cooper – University of Sydney.

Hosted by: Joel Eaves

Title: Exciton Science: From the Bottom Up

Abstract:

One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century will be our transition away from a reliance on fossil fuels to power the world. This will require new methods of generating and transforming energy, involving materials with clever design of light-matter interactions. Equally important is to make these materials via scalable, energy-efficient processes, so that new technologies can be deployed at scale with low embodied energy. This, in turn, will require better control over the spontaneous, bottom-up organization of atoms, molecules and nanoparticles into ordered structures at near-ambient conditions.

In my presentation, I will discuss how we are addressing this problem, in collaboration with experimental partners, via the use of theoretical modelling and computer simulations. This will include discussion of how nanoparticles interact with each other in solution [1-3], how they can be driven to assemble into optically anisotropic materials [4-5], and of how the microstructure of printable perovskite solar cells depends on their interaction with light [6].

References

1)  Kister, T. et al. ACS Nano 2018, 12, 5969.

2)  Monego, D. et al. Langmuir 2018, 34, 12982.

3)  Monego, D. et al. ACS Nano 2020, 14, 5278.

4)  Zhang, H. et al. Adv. Funct. Mater. 2021, 31, 2006753

5)  Zhang, H. et al. Adv. Optical Mater. 2022, 10, 2200179

6)  Mao, W. et al. Nat. Mater. 2021, 20, 55