Perovskite solar cells have established their place as one of the most exciting solar cell technologies currently under investigation. The efficiency of solar cells based on perovskites has rapidly increased from an initial promising value of 9% in 2012 to over 22% currently, making this the fastest-advancing solar cell technology. The impressive increase in efficiency has led to an enormous surge in interest. Despite the great potential, perovskite solar cell technology is still in the early stages of commercialization because of remaining problems: long term stability, scalability and toxicity of lead, present in the best performing cells. Since the materials and device fabrication are still relatively new, there is great opportunity for further research towards increasing efficiency and stability, prolonging lifetime and replacing toxic materials with safer ones. The PIs have developed efficient and accurate DFT (
www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-14435-4) and Monte Carlo methods (
Nature Materials 12, 652 (2013).), which are ideally suited to study the thermodynamics, electronic structure and photophysics of perovskite materials and perovskite solar cells.
In this context, a PhD project on 'Modelling of Perovskite Solar Cells' is defined within the joint initiative 'Storing Solar Energy' of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the Dutch Institute For Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER,
www.differ.nl). Your tasks as a PhD student will involve: (i) computational modelling of the stability of perovskites; (ii) computational exploration of lead-free perovskites; (iii) modelling of the photophysics of perovskite solar cells. You will be a member of the Centre for Computational Energy Research (CCER,
www.ccer.nl), which has been founded by TU/e and DIFFER in 2017. Your work place will be in the DIFFER building on the TU/e campus, while your formal appointment will be within the Department of Applied Physics at the TU/e. You will intensively interact with other computational scientists at the CCER and experimental researchers at DIFFER. You will intensively collaborate with experimental researchers in the field of perovskite solar cells in the group Molecular Materials and Nanosystems (M2N,
www.m2ngroup.nl) at the TU/e lead by Prof.dr. René Janssen.