The Georgia Tech-COPE Distinguished Lecture Series welcomes Dr. Robert Street, Senior Research Fellow from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), on "Disorder Effects in the Electronic Properties of Organic Solar Cells." 

While the event is free, please take a moment to RSVP here.

Robert Street received a physics BA and Ph.D. from Cambridge University.  After working at Sheffield University and the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, he joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (now Palo Alto Research Center Inc.) in California, where he is now a Senior Research Fellow.  His research concentrates on large area electronics, including hydrogenated amorphous silicon, large area image sensor arrays for x-ray medical imaging and more recently, organic semiconductors and flexible electronics.  

"Disorder Effects in the Electronic Properties of Organic Solar Cells"

Bulk heterojunction organic solar cells have a complex physical structure made up of nanoscale domains of donors and acceptors, each of which is a disordered material.  Understanding the electronic properties has proved controversial, with several competing models of transport and recombination.  The talk will focus on the role of localized electronic states introduced by the disorder or by impurities. Disorder introduces exponential band tails and deep traps in the electronic structure and experiments show that these play a central role in the electronic transport and recombination mechanisms.  Trap creation induced by irradiation is also shown to cause degradation of some solar cells.