Research Director and Group Leader of Interfaces and Hybrid Materials for Photovoltaics CNRS
Philip Schulz holds the position of Research Director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and pursues his research activities at the Institut Photovoltaïque d'Île-de-France (IPVF) located on the Paris Saclay research campus. At IPVF, he leads the Interfaces and Hybrid Materials group installed through a Young Investigator award in the "Make Our Planet Great Again" initiative of President Emmanuel Macron of the French Republic.
Before entering CNRS in 2017, Philip Schulz has been a postdoctoral researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) from 2014 to 2017 and the Surface and Interfaces Science Laboratory at Princeton University from 2012 to 2014, where he studied interface design in organic electronics and hybrid organic / inorganic solar cells. Philip Schulz received his Ph.D. in physics from the RWTH Aachen University in Germany in 2012, during which he was awarded a DAAD fellowship to pursue part of his studies at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
In the past decade, halide perovskite (HaP)-based solar cells (PSC) demonstrated a remarkable breakthrough in photovoltaic performance with power conversion efficiencies exceeding 25%. HaPs mark an outstanding class of materials for photon absorption but are prone to degradation due to their hybrid organic inorganic character and hence volatile chemical components and reactive halide ions. While HaPs exhibit a pronounced defect tolerance and self-healing such that the electronic properties do not change considerably with the formation of defects, film degradation will eventually deteriorate the optoelectronic properties. A key strategy to substantially enhance the stability of these compounds is to modify the interfaces and thereby control the chemistry and driving force for ion migration in the perovskite film. My talk will focus on the means and developments to analyze and tailor interfaces in HaP based semiconductor devices to gain control over the electronic properties at the nanoscale and electronic coupling to adjacent functional layers. On the one hand, the device characteristics can be affected by the alignment of the frontier molecular orbitals of an organic charge transport layers (CTL) with the electronic transport level in the perovskite. On the other hand, the doping type of the substrate underneath can template the doping type of subsequently deposited HaP films. In our studies we elucidated these mechanisms by examining a selection of charge transport layers adjacent to the perovskite film.
Research Director and Group Leader of Interfaces and Hybrid Materials for Photovoltaics CNRS