The title of this post deserves some clarification. Isn’t the answer obvious? You need to understand how solar cells work in order to improve them and physics are the foundation of that understanding, right? We suspect that most people would
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Advancing PV: from passivation to contacts
– A passivating contact workshop
On 31 January 2018 more than 80 people from 11 different countries attended the event Advancing PV: from passivation to contacts – A passivating contact workshop. The interesting presentations of the invited speakers together with the extensive discussion with the audience

Surface science aspects of (plasma) ALD reactions
– Extending the legacy of Harold Winters
The fact that Dr. Harold Winters passed away last year – at the age of 83 – has led to initiatives in tribute of Harold and his profound contributions to plasma science. One of these initiatives is a Special Issue

Advancing PV: from passivation to contacts
– A passivating contact workshop
Aim – The goal of this one-day workshop is to provide a platform to learn more about passivating contacts for crystalline silicon solar cells. Unlike the PV conferences where this topic already receives a fair amount of attention, this platform will

Stop motion movie of a novel area-selective ALD approach
– Building a film with nanoblocks – literally!
As will be clear from many of our posts on this blog(1, 2, 3), area-selective deposition (ASD) is currently an extremely hot research topic. This is mainly because of its potential application in future nanoelectronics as a solution to the

In situ spectroscopic ellipsometry and ALD
– How ellipsometry became a popular technique to monitor ALD film growth
Serendipity is often cited as a key factor in scientific innovations. I can fully confirm this as will also be obvious from the subtitle of this blog site: “Blog about strategy, serendipity and vision in nanoscience”. From my point of

Uniform or Area-Selective ALD of In2O3:H?
– It’s all about nucleation
A little while ago I wrote a blog about my PhD project. In this blog, I explained that most of my PhD project revolved around an atomic layer deposition (ALD) process that I developed to make hydrogen-doped indium oxide (In2O3:H):

New developments in area selective deposition
– Take-home messages from the 2nd Area Selective Deposition workshop (ASD2017)
As announced in our previous blog post on the 2nd area selective deposition (ASD2017) workshop, this post will highlight the new developments in the field of ASD. I will summarize my take-home messages from the workshop by discussing three topics

The solar-powered family car Stella Vie
– a closer look at the solar cells
On June 21, the Solar Team Eindhoven launched its 5-person, solar-powered family car “Stella Vie”. The car, which has been developed by students at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), will take part in the cruiser class event of the

The dawn of atomic-scale processing
– The growing importance of atomic layer deposition and etching
A few weeks ago, the big news was that the research alliance of IBM, Global Foundries and Samsung unveiled the world’s first 5 nm chip as we could all read everywhere over the internet [1]. Most notable was however the