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A hybrid workflow to discover tailored functional energy materials for photovoltaics
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主讲人: Prof. Christoph J. Brabec, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg & HIERN, Germany
地点: 物理楼西301教室
时间: 2025年9月1日 (星期一) Beijing 15:00-17:00
主持 联系人: 肖立新(Tel: 62767290)
主讲人简介: Christoph J. Brabec received his PhD (1995) in Physical Chemistry from Linz University, Austria and joined the group of Alan Heeger at UC Santa Barbara (USA) for a sabbatical. He joined the SIEMENS research labs (project leader) in 2001, Konarka in 2004 (CTO), Erlangen University (FAU - Professor for Material Science) in 2009, ZAE Bayern e.V. (scientific director and board member) in 2010, spokesmen of the Interdisciplinary Center for Nanostructured Films (IZNF) in 2013 and became director at FZ Jülich (IEK-11) in 2018. In 2018 he was further appointed as Honorary Professor at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a regular member of the Bavarian Academy of Science. His research interests include all aspects of solution processing organic, hybrid and inorganics semiconductor devices with a strong focus on photovoltaics and renewable energy systems. A major research interest are scalable processing technologies allowing to control microstructure formation in disordered semiconductors. A very recent activity explores the limitation of autonomous operating research line for accelerating innovation and inventions in materials science. His combined scientific and technological interests supported the spin-out of several companies. He published over 1000 articles, thereof over 800 peer reviewed articles, about 100 patents, several books and book chapters and overall received 100.000 citations. His h-index is over 150 and Thompson Reuters HRC lists him for the last years consecutively as a highly cited researcher.

The inverse design of tailored organic molecules for specific optoelectronic devices of high complexity holds an enormous potential but has not yet been realized. Current models rely on large data sets that generally do not exist for specialized research fields. We demonstrate a closed-loop workflow that combines high-throughput synthesis of organic semiconductors to create large data sets and Bayesian optimization to discover new hole-transporting materials with tailored properties for solar cell applications. The predictive models were based on molecular descriptors that allowed us to link the structure of these materials to their performance. A series of high-performance molecules were identified from minimal suggestions and achieved up to 26.2% (certified 25.9%) power conversion efficiency in perovskite solar cells. This milestone underlines the feasibility of developing autonomous research strategies that discover materials tailored for specific applications. That requires a highly interconnected workflow including synthesis, purification, characterization and device optimization. Such lines could specifically develop optimized interface materials for perovskite cells with various bandgaps, but also discover optimized interfaces for LEDs, photodetectors or X-Ray detectors. The outlook will summarize the advantages but also the limitations of data driven methods and will give further examples of such campaigns searching to find optimized materials for very different applications.