Events
Seminar Title: Nanoribbon antimony chalcogenide solar cells
| Date: | Wednesday 27 January 2027 15:00 - 16:00  |
| Location: | SEMS seminar room |
Seminar Title: Nanoribbon antimony chalcogenide solar cells
Abstract: Thin-film solar cells are now an established commercial technology, offering low-cost photovoltaic power generation at multi-gigawatt manufacturing scale. Despite this maturity, there remains significant interest in the development of new semiconductor absorbers that combine high performance with simple processing, low materials consumption, and the use of earth-abundant elements.
Among the most promising emerging materials are anisotropic semiconductors composed of van der Waals bonded nanoribbons. Their quasi-one-dimensional crystal structure offers potential advantages for thin-film photovoltaics, particularly through reduced sensitivity to grain boundaries compared with conventional polycrystalline absorbers.
This lecture will discuss the development of antimony selenide (Sb2Se3) solar cells, an emerging thin-film photovoltaic technology that has attracted increasing international attention over the past decade. Sb2Se3 possesses a near-optimal direct bandgap of ~1.17 eV, strong optical absorption, simple phase chemistry, and a distinctive one-dimensional crystal structure formed from covalently bonded ribbons. Related antimony chalcogenides also offer significant flexibility in optoelectronic properties, with Sb2S3 providing a wider ~1.7 eV bandgap of interest for tandem and indoor photovoltaic applications, while mixed S/Se alloys currently deliver the highest reported device efficiencies within the material family.
The talk will trace the development antimony chalcogenide photovoltaics from early proof-of-concept devices to recent advances in materials growth and device engineering, with particular focus on work carried out at the University of Liverpool. Opportunities for further development of nanoribbon semiconductors, and the remaining scientific challenges associated with these materials, will also be discussed.
Dr Jon Major is a Reader in the Department of Physics and the Stephenson Institute for Renewable Energy at the University of Liverpool. He leads a research group focused on developing next-generation thin-film photovoltaic technologies, with an emphasis on scalable processing, grain boundary engineering, and inorganic absorber materials such as cadmium telluride and antimony chalcogenides. His group works at the intersection of materials chemistry and device physics, using a variety of fabrication methods and advanced characterisation techniques and to understand and overcome performance-limits in polycrystalline semiconductors.
| Arranged by: | Queen Mary University of London |
| Contact: | Haixue Yan |
| Email: | h.x.yan@qmul.ac.uk |
| Research Centre: | Sustainable Engineering |