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Quantifying Defect Tolerance in Semiconductors

Rachel Kurchin, Ohio Supercomputer Center

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Steven Gordon, Rachel Kurchin

Climate change is a critical challenge facing this generation, and if we are to address it part of the solution must include a decarbonized electricity sector. Photovoltaic (PV) solar cells are sure to play a vital role in this system. My research aims to discover new materials that could enable drastically cheaper PV. Such materials’ performance is less sensitive to defects (imperfections in their atomic structure), which means that they can be manufactured via cheaper methods such as solution processing. We approach this problem through quantum mechanical calculations of the atomic-scale physics of the defects themselves to build a detailed understanding of what makes defects extremely detrimental in some materials (such as silicon, the dominant PV material today) and relatively benign in others. This will eventually enable us to design defect-tolerant materials for the next generation of PV technologies.