Nozik

Art Nozik Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 22:59:03 +0000

Art Nozik Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/24/2024 - 16:59

Art Nozik elected to the 2024 class for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2024 Award Announcement

Full list of 2024 Recipients

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780 to help a young nation face its challenges through shared purpose, knowledge, and ideas.The first members were selected in 1781, and in 2024 250 members were elected to join the Academy. The new members are recognized for their excellence.The members elected in 2024 include representatives from across 31 disciplines, including such diverse fields as psychology, photography, journalism, Economics, history, music, and law.

Art Nozik was recognized as part of the Chemistry Section, joining a prestigious group of scholars from across the Arts and Sciences.

Congratulations Art!

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2023 Nozik Lecture | Prof. Jenna Jambeck

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 07:00:00 +0000

2023 Nozik Lecture | Prof. Jenna Jambeck Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/12/2023 - 00:00

Watch the Lecture here

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Events Page

The Jambeck Research Group

2022 MacArthur Fellow Announcement

Named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow for her work investigating the scale of plastic pollution and galvanizing efforts to address plastic waste, Prof. Jenna Jambeck is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering in the University of Georgia College of Engineering. Jambeck is internationally recognized for her research on plastic waste in the ocean and for the Marine Debris Tracker app she co-created with fellow faculty member Kyle Johnsen. She notes that being active in research helps bring current environmental engineering issues into the classroom for students.

Jenna presented the 2023 Nozik Lecture on Tuesday December 12, 2023 at 4:00 PM, which was followed by a poster reception. We had a fantastic turnout, with more than 120 interested folks attending the presentation and sticking around to discuss research in the poster session.

Stories from Sea to Source: Reducing Plastic Pollution

Plastic debris and its impacts in the environment have been widely documented, but the quantity entering the ocean from land was previously unknown. By linking worldwide data on solid waste, population density, and economic status, Dr. Jambeck made the first estimate of plastics entering our ocean globally. Cumulative global plastic production reached 8 billion metric tons in 2017. 6.4 billion metric tons has become waste that has overwhelmed some waste management systems around the world that have not been able to keep up infrastructure with economic growth. In addition, the global trade of plastic waste intended for recycling has influenced what countries can do with plastic as a recycled material with economic impacts worldwide. Shifting to where the burden of plastics is carried, the community level, Dr. Jambeck and her team created the Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP). CAP is a rigorous, cost-effective toolkit for assessing materials management systems at the community level which has been used in 51 cities in 14 countries. Dr. Jambeck will not only discuss the methods and results of her research, but also impacts and related policies around the world. She will present an intervention framework to reduce plastic ending up in our environment while sharing stories of integrating technology and citizen science, science communication, and community-level efforts to address plastic pollution around the globe.

Biography

Dr. Jenna Jambeck is a Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering at the University of Georgia, a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Founder of the Circularity Informatics Lab in the New Materials Institute and a National Geographic Explorer. She has been conducting research on solid waste issues for over 25 years and marine debris/plastic pollution for 22 years. Her work has been recognized by the global community and translated into policy discussions by the High-Level Panel for the Ocean, testimony to Congress, in G7 and G20 Declarations, and the United Nations Environment program. She has conducted public environmental diplomacy as an International Informational Speaker for the US Department of State since 2017. This has included multiple global programs of speaking events, meetings, presentations to governmental bodies, and media outreach around the world including Chile, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Vietnam, Jordan, Israel, South Korea, India, Taiwan and China. She has won awards for her teaching and research in the College of Engineering and the UGA Creative Research Medal, as well as a Public Service and Outreach Fellowship. In 2014 she sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with 13 other women in eXXpedition to sample land and open ocean plastic and encourage women to enter STEM disciplines. In 2019 she co-led the first ever women-led expedition team for National Geographic conducting comprehensive research on plastic pollution in the Ganga River Basin. She and her research team lead the science component of the Mississippi River Plastic Pollution Initiative along with the Mayors along the Mississippi and UNEP North America. She is co-developer of the mobile app Marine Debris Tracker, a tool that continues to facilitate a growing global citizen science initiative. The app and citizen science program has documented the location of nearly eight million litter and marine debris items documented in our environment throughout the world. Follow her work on Instagram @JennaJambeck

Stories from Sea to Source: Reducing Plastic Pollution

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2022 Nozik Lecture | Prof. Nate Lewis

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 06:00:00 +0000

2022 Nozik Lecture | Prof. Nate Lewis Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/29/2022 - 00:00

Prof. Nathan S. Lewis has been a Professor at Caltech since 1988, an active leader in the solar fuels / solar chemical field for over 40 years. Prof. Lewis has published over 600 papers, presented hundreds of public and technical lectures and has worked with researchers from across the world in exploring the development of solar fuels.

Nate presented the inaugural 2022 Nozik Lecture on Monday August 29, 2022. The turnout was fantastic, both in person and online, with a full, but socially distant room. Making an afternoon of the proceedings Nate gave two talks, one looking at big picture methods for the decarbonization of the U.S Electricity Grid, the second taking a very technical deep dive into chemical materials that can “see” light.

Reliable Decarbonized U.S. Electricity Systems

Prof. Nathan Lewis | Caltech

Monday August 29, 2022 | 1:30 PM

SEEC Auditorium C120

Using a data-driven approach based on 39 years of hourly weather data to derive the variability of the wind and solar resource across the contiguous U.S., we analyze the gaps between supply and historical demand that would be present in an electricity system in which generation was provided by variable wind and solar resources. We then assess the dynamical relationships and in an idealized system assess the cost-effectiveness of various approaches to satisfy resource adequacy planning requirements, including overbuilding and extensive curtailment of variable renewable generation assets, short and long term storage embodied by batteries, flow batteries and power-to-gas-to-power, flexible nuclear generation, and flexible loads such as generation of hydrogen or electrofuels. We additionally have assessed the implications of regionalization of generation assets and load-balancing regions such as California or the Western Interconnect on the needs for flexibility and storage in view of the increased variability and frequency and duration of resource droughts that occurs as the generation and load-balancing regions are confined geographically. In California, we additionally show that addition of existing hydroelectric generation slightly increases the need for long-duration storage as opposed to decreasing it, due to the seasonal mismatch between hydroelectric generation and electricity demand. The analyses moreover emphasize the need for multi-year planning to ensure resource adequacy in systems that have large contributions of generation from variable renewables.

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Watch the 2022 Nozik Lecture

Inorganic Phototropic Growth of Materials that See the Light

Prof. Nathan Lewis | Caltech

Monday August 29, 2022 | 4:00 PM

SEEC Auditorium C120

We have discovered a materials phenomenon, which we term inorganic phototropic growth, in which materials grow in real time, in 3-D space, towards a uniform intensity, uncorrelated beam of low intensity light, as occurs in for example palm trees, sunflowers, and corals. The growth results in the rapid, light-directed formation of anisotropic complex, three-dimensional mesoscale morphologies of materials over macroscopic areas, providing access to nanostructures and morphologies that can not readily be made by any other method. The phenomenon transcends traditional chemical and engineering disciplines: no lasers, no physical masks, no lithographic processing, no direct-write technology, no far-field modulation, no templates, and no chemical agents (ligands, surfactants) are used to direct the patterning, but full 3-D control is obtainable over the resulting morphology of the structure by manipulation the properties of the incident lightstimuli during growth. The nanostructures are created in a single-step synthesis and are determined both by the inherent response of the electronic processes within semiconductors to the presence of light, and by thetunable properties (e.g. wavelength, polarization, and direction) of light present during the electrodeposition. We have experimentally explored this emergent phenomenon by determining how specific optical inputs encode for specific morphologies, and have developed a model that accurately reproduces the experimentally observed nanostructures for the optical inputs and material systems explored thus far. Our work to date has been focused on the growth of Group II-VI materials (i.e. Se-Te alloys and PbSe); however, we expect that theemerging phenomenon underlying the growth process will prove general for the electrodeposition of semiconductors in the presence of light. We provide a brief overview of our work to date, and outline research directions designed to provide the further scientific insight into the processes behind this novel route to nanoscale and mesoscale materials design and synthesis that will be essential to the development of future technologies that exploit the phenomenon.

Reliable Decarbonized U.S. Electricity Systems

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Profile: Arthur Nozik

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Profile: Arthur Nozik Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/22/2022 - 00:00

Daniel Morton

As someone who has been a researcher at NREL (previously SERI) for over 40 years, Prof. Arthur J. (Art) Nozik has witnessed a paradigm shift in energy research. As a founding member of RASEI, and as we prepare to launch the Nozik Lecture Series, we thought it would be a good time to find out a little more about Art, his path into renewable energy research, some of his experiences and investigations, and advice he would give to folks considering a career in renewable energy.

Tell us a bit about your childhood and your path into the sciences

I was born in 1936 into a very poor family at the tail end of the Great Depression, the youngest sibling of 3 sisters and 2 brothers. My mother had emigrated in 1920 from Glusk , Russia (now in Belarus) to the U.S in the midst of the counter-revolutionary civil war between the White Russians and Cossacks against the Soviet Bolsheviks. Pogroms in Glusk were a common event, and after warnings by her neighbors that a pogrom was imminent the next day, my mother fled overnight, alone with 3 children, taking 2 years to cross Europe and the Atlantic Ocean arriving in Ellis Island in New York Harbor in early January, 1923. My father, who died at 46 in early 1938 when I was barely 2 years old, and was thus unknown to me, also mysteriously arrived with my mother at Ellis Island, and his death in 1938 left my immigrant mother with 6 children and no financial resources; she survived on welfare for some time during WW II and she worked at a weapons factory since the male work force (including my two brothers) was depleted by war service.

During my early youth several important events occurred that vividly remain in my memory: Pearl Harbor (1941), Wendell Wilkie’s failed presidential campaign against FDR (1940), Thomas Dewey’s failed campaign against FDR (1944), FDR’s sudden death (1945), and the splitting of the atom followed by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (1945). The latter profoundly stimulated my interest in science, though this emotion was moderated by the horror of the instantaneous death of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. Notwithstanding, I decided then, at 9, to become a scientist.

I was enrolled in an orthodox religious school even before attending kindergarten. For a decade I attended the religious school for several hours every day after public school and on weekends. There, I was exposed to serious and devoted scholarly teachers who conveyed the passion, joy, and value of learning, of difficult study, of curiosity, and of asking and trying to answer complicated and difficult questions. This experience prepared me well for my scientific career, and inspired me to seek the highest level of advanced education possible. This journey into science led me away from the dogma and doctrines of organized religion.

I began working at age 14, first picking tobacco in the fields of nearby Connecticut; then as a paper boy, which led to a lifelong habit of reading the New York Times every day, which I continue to do, then in high school driving and selling ice-cream from an ice cream truck during the summer and also working every day after class during the school year for a drug distribution company.

Describe how you joined the energy research efforts at NREL and RASEI

Before the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) was officially designated as one of the 17 U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratories by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, it was initially designated as the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) and was created under the administration of President Jimmy Carter in March 1977. This was done in response to the global energy crisis created by the OPEC oil embargos of 1973 and 1978. The initial motivation for SERI’s formation was energy security (the U.S. was importing >50% of its petroleum needs in the years after the 1973 oil crisis, and the U.S. natural gas supply was predicted (erroneously) to be depleted by the mid-1980s). SERI grew from zero staff in 1977 to 1200 by 1979 (I joined in Oct, 1978).

During the late 1970s after SERI was established, there was a lot of skepticism in Congress and in the public more generally, that renewable energy, especially solar energy, was a viable energy option. For example, the cost of photovoltaic (PV) electricity in 1974 was $6-8/kWh (today it is less than $0.06 – $0.08/kWh). In addition, there was a strong push-back on the political front from conservative senators and representatives, and their fossil fuel industry supporters, who didn’t like the idea of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy; this resulted in many senators and representatives taking a look at the newly established SERI and holding congressional hearings (I participated in a few). The general feeling was that it was a haven for hippies of the 1960s, running around in Birkenstock sandals (I did wear a pair), not serious scientists. At universities, including CU, there was skepticism and aloofness about the new, unknown, and unproven group of scientists working at SERI. The skepticism gradually diminished, and in 1999 I became the first Professor Adjoint from NREL appointed to the Chemistry Faculty at CU.

But the early SERI research staff were good, dedicated, and innovative young scientists and began to make important advances in the science and engineering of renewable energy to bring its cost down along a Moore’s Law type of Learning Curve, resulting in renewable wind and PV energy costs being driven down to about ½ of that from fossil and nuclear power plants by 2020. Furthermore, new funding from DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) was obtained in 1980 to support a new SERI research Branch called the Solar Photoconversion Branch, focused on solar fuels and artificial photosynthesis, particularly hydrogen production through solar water splitting; I was the Branch Chief from 1980 to 1985, followed by my appointment in 1985 as one of the two initial NREL Senior Research Fellows in NREL’s new Fellows Program (there were a total of 3 initial Fellows appointed in 1985).

However, Ronald Reagan campaigned for President in 1980 on the promise to close the Dept of Energy because “they never produced a barrel of oil”; Reagan’s campaign, together with the Iranian revolution in 1979 that removed the Shah of Iran plus the taking of hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Iran, led to the election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of President Carter in the 1980 election. The situation at SERI after Reagan became President was tumultuous: although President Reagan never did close the DOE, the then Secretary of Energy James Edwards came to SERI in 1981 to consider closing it down, but he was persuaded by Golden Elder Joe Coors to not do so (that’s another story for another time). But 2/3 of the SERI staff was terminated, reducing it from 1200 to 400), and SERI funding was also reduced by two-thirds. But since significant renewable energy utilization was considered a very distant prospect, the basic science programs at SERI funded by BES survived, and flourishes today at greatly enhanced levels of staff and DOE funding, as well as excellent scientific and technological progress, reflected in part by its partnership with RASEI.

Beginning in the 1990s, advances in extraction technology for fossil resources, has led to general agreement that the planet has >100 years of fossil fuel in the ground. But the vast majority of climate scientists have also concluded that the present usage rate of fossil fuel cannot continue without drastic harmful consequences for the environmental health of the earth because of the associated emission of CO₂ greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Thus, in more recent years, climate change and the need for viable renewable energy alternatives to fossil energy to help sufficiently ameliorate climate change to avoid its worst consequences has become a critical mission for NREL. However, the climate change projections have engendered a strong political backlash, primarily to resist abandonment of the enormous fossil fuel supply and infrastructure at a huge near-term financial cost to the fossil fuel industry and its stakeholders. This has created a very strong political element in the support and funding of NREL’s renewable energy programs by Congress and since 1980 has led to large and unpredictable periodic swings in NREL’s annual budgets depending on the political philosophy of the elected Government Administration and Members of Congress. These are still the political and funding challenges and realities of NREL.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

My devoted and loving wife, Rhoda, and I both enjoy hiking, skiing (XC and downhill), biking, and travelling to the artic regions on National Geographic Expeditions.

What made you focus your research on harvesting solar energy?

I first became interested in renewable energy, specifically both photovoltaic (PV) and solar fuels (the latter mainly solar water splitting for creating the so-called hydrogen economy), in the early 1970s. Regarding PV, in 1972, I discovered a new defect semiconductor, Cadmium Stannate, or CTO, that had the best properties as a transparent conductor (very high transparency in the solar spectral region coupled with high conductivity) when compared to other known transparent conductor (ITO, FTO), and it held promise for use in PV solar cells; support for this application was provided by the NSF’s RANN (Research Applied to National Needs) program, which existed from 1971 to 1977. In August 1977, the RANN program was terminated and essentially transferred to ERDA (Energy Research and Development Agency), which in October 1977 was incorporated into the newly formed Department of Energy (DOE); SERI was included in this reorganization and became a DOE funded facility. Also in 1972, following up on my thesis research using Mössbauer spectroscopy to study the electronic properties of Iron-based systems, I discovered that Iron 3+ adsorbed on polycrystalline titanium dioxide surfaces could be oxidized to Iron 4+ when the titanium dioxide was photoexcited with supra-band-gap light (>3 eV). Because the redox potential of the Iron 3+ / Iron 4+ couple is very positive (∼+1.6 V), it was clear that the positive holes photogenerated in titanium dioxide had very strong oxidation potentials. Then, in 1972, the famous Fujishima−Honda paper appeared in Nature, demonstrating that water could be photodecomposed to hydrogen and oxygen gas in a photoelectrolysis cell containing a near-UV-illuminated titanium dioxide photoanode. This paper was consistent with my earlier finding of the strong oxidizing power of photoexcited titanium dioxide.

The oil embargo and energy crisis of 1973−1974 produced a sudden and intense flurry and level of support for research and development for alternatives to fossil energy; this included new R&D activities in industry and at universities. I joined Allied Chemical in 1974 to pursue research on photoelectrochemical energy conversion; this led to my paper in Nature in 1975 that was the first follow-up to the 1972 Fujishima−Honda paper, which clarified some issues with the use of titanium dioxide as a photoanode in a photoelectrolysis solar fuel-producing cell. All of my early 1970s research described above and in the literature from 1975 to 1978 was carried out in the large basic corporate research laboratories of American Cyanamid and Allied Chemical. In 1978, I moved from Allied Chemical to the new DOE SERI laboratory to establish and pursue both photoelectrochemical PV and solar fuels research; I have continued this pursuit ever since at both NREL and beginning in 1999 as a Professor Adjoint and since 2012 as a Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry at CU, Boulder and since 2008 as a RASEI Fellow.

Could you describe a big obstacle you encountered in your research and how you overcame it?

Perseverance is necessary in tackling big problems. It often takes a lot of time, collaboration and effort to discover solutions to big challenges. A review, published in 2001, describes over 25 years of work on harvesting hot carriers.

A few years after I initiated research on the photoelectrolysis of water (1974), I became interested (together with my close and now deceased collaborator Professor Ferd Williams, at the time Chair of Physics at the University of Delaware,) in the possibility that photogenerated hot carriers could be harvested in photoelectrochemical cells to greatly enhance the conversion efficiency of solar photoconversion and exceed the well-known and widely accepted detailed-balance Shockley−Queisser (S−Q) conversion efficiency limit (∼33 %) at 1 sun intensity. S−Q type calculations assuming full utilization of hot carriers (zero energy loss from cooling) showed a maximum theoretical efficiency of about 66% for a single semiconductor photomaterial; this is the same value shown by the S−Q analysis for a conventional (i.e., fully cooled carriers) multijunction PV cell containing >5 tandem p−n junctions of different compositions and band gaps. The realization of a hot carrier PV cell is very difficult because it requires that the rate of hot carrier interfacial charge transfer from the photoexcited semiconductor photoelectrode be faster than the rate of hot carrier cooling to the semiconductor band edges produced through electron (or hole)−phonon scattering, and the latter process is generally much faster (ps to sub-ps) than interfacial charge transfer from bulk semiconductors to molecular acceptors. This then led us to the concept of slowed cooling rates of hot carriers through size quantization in quantum-confined semiconductor structures that creates relatively large separation between quantized electronic states, thus requiring simultaneous and improbable electron−many-phonon scattering events to dissipate the kinetic energy of the hot carriers; this slowed cooling process has been termed a phonon bottleneck. Subsequently (1982− 1983), hot electron transfer across semiconductor−molecule interfaces was achieved with highly doped p-type photocathodes, wherein a thin (10 nm) space-charge layer is created with 1-D quantum confinement of electrons. Further work (1986−1992) with III−V semiconductor superlattices, which consist of atomically flat films of multiple quantum well layers (having 1-D quantum confinement) separated by thin potential barrier layers (<4 nm) that allow interwell tunneling and miniband formation, demonstrated hot carrier cooling that was slower by 2 orders of magnitude (100s of ps) compared to bulk GaAs. The cooling was slowest when the photoexcitation intensity was very high, producing hot phonons; this effect was termed a hot phonon bottleneck.

However, the largest advance in approaches for the utilization of hot carriers to enhance the performance of solar cells was initiated in 1984−1985 when carrier confinement in three dimensions and the associated 3-D size quantization, in the form of QDs (also termed nanocrystals), was conceived and demonstrated not only at SERI but independently and earlier in the 1980s by A. Ekimov and Al. L. Efros in Russia and by L. Brus at Bell Laboratories. The potential utility of QDs in solar cells for achieving more efficient solar photon conversion to electricity (PV) and solar fuels was fully appreciated by the end of the 1990s and has now become a quite large research field in its own right today. This and other approaches to beating the S−Q limit for PV cells together with lowering their areal cost is generally termed next- or future- or third-generation PVs.

Although we found that a hot phonon bottleneck could slow hot electron cooling in a solar cell based on a semiconductor superlattice, the need for ultrahigh light intensity was a practical drawback. Furthermore, the fact that 1-D confinement in a superlattice produced electronic subbands with a dispersion in k space meant that hot carrier cooling from high quantum levels could proceed via an intersub-band transfer with a one electron−one phonon scattering event; this produced a hot carrier in the next lowest sub-band that could cool further to the bottom of the subband via a cascade of single one electron−one phonon scattering events. This process could repeat itself for all lower energy sub-bands until the hot carriers cooled to the lowest energy state of the system and thus were fully cooled. Slowed cooling in structures with 1-D quantum confinement and high light intensity arises because the formation of hot nonequilibrated, confined phonons coupled with the high photoexcitation intensity modifies the phonon characteristics to reduce the strength of electron−phonon interactions compared to those for bulk semiconductors. However, in the 1990s, I and others recognized that 3-D confinement in QDs could produce a phonon bottleneck and slow hot carrier cooling without the need for high photoexcitation intensities (in QDs, the electron and hole charge carriers are coupled by Coulomb interactions and exist as neutral excitons); the quantized energy levels in 3-D confined structures produce no dispersion in k space, just pure discrete atomic-like levels, thus requiring hot carriers (excitons) to undergo simultaneous (and thus improbable) many-phonon−electron interactions in order to cool. However, experimental verification of a phonon bottleneck in QDs has been controversial, with many publications showing either positive or negative support for a phonon bottleneck.

In the 1990s, it became clear to me that QDs incorporated into solar cells (for PVs or solar fuels) could greatly enhance solar conversion efficiencies and beat the S−Q limit. In addition to the potential for slowed cooling, QDs were also recognized as enhancing the possibility of creating multiple electron−hole pairs (excitons in QDs) from a single absorbed photon due to a reverse Auger process driven by strong Coulomb coupling in the QDs; this predicted effect was first verified experimentally by Klimov and Schaller in 2004. The exciton multiplication process in QDs has been termed multiple exciton generation (MEG) or carrier multiplication (CM); it is a well-known process in bulk semiconductors, but there, it is termed impact ionization and involves free electrons and holes, not excitons. The forward Auger process, whereby a biexciton could undergo recombination of one exciton and transfer the recombination energy to the electron or hole of the remaining exciton, was proposed by Al. L. Efros in 1996 to explain photoluminescence blinking in QDs and is consistent with the inverse Auger process of MEG. All of the above discussed exciton dynamics, controversies, history, and potential MEG applications to solar photoconversion are reviewed and discussed in the review linked to the left.

What advice would you give to a junior researcher interested in entering the field of solar energy?

My advice to young researchers to achieve success in any field is to “think outside the box” as much as possible. Maximize your creativity and learn to connect the dots of research progress in widely different fields that are outside of, or apparently tangential, to your own specialized area. This is done by stimulating your curiosity, exploring science outside of your narrow field, and reading, talking to, and listening to presentations of other scientists to the maximum extent allowed by your personal situation. Persistence in following your instincts and ideas despite setbacks is also critical - don’t allow discouragement to prevent ultimate success.

Why is it so important that we move to using renewable energy sources, in particular solar power?

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that the present concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere (415 ppm and rising about 2 ppm/yr) compared to a stable value of 280 ppm at the start of the industrial revolution 100 years ago, is causing huge negative effects of climate change around the globe, and these effects will get progressively worse in the future unless this level of CO₂ is reduced by using renewable energy to replace fossil fuel. Solar irradiance at the surface of the earth delivers as much energy in one hour as all the energy consumed on earth by humanity in one year (18 TW in 2020). The challenge is to implement this change from fossil energy to renewable energy at a reasonable financial cost and appropriate scale before the CO₂ level reaches 450 ppm (the point of no return when the most drastic consequences of climate change are unavoidable and irreversible; the date of this point of no return is predicted to occur by about 2035 at the current and expected future increasing rate of CO₂ emissions.

We are running out of time!

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2021 Next Generation Solar Energy Conference 6

Anonymous — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 07:00:00 +0000

2021 Next Generation Solar Energy Conference 6 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/08/2021 - 00:00

The NGSE-6 took place from December 6-8, 2021, and was co-organized by RASEI, with RASEI Fellow Garry Rumbles on the Organizing Committee. The program covered the following areas:

Fundamentals of Photovoltaics and Simulation
Organic Photovoltaics – Materials, Stability
Perovskites – Materials, Stability
Advanced Concepts, Processing & Upscaling, Applications

RASEI Fellows Matt Beard, Art Nozik, Sean Shaheen, and Mike Toney were invited keynote speakers.

NGSE-6

RASEI helped host NGSE-6 at CU Boulder in December 2021

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Gerischer Electrochemistry Today - 2018

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 06:00:00 +0000

Gerischer Electrochemistry Today - 2018 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/16/2018 - 00:00

This Symposium features the scientific legacy of the research of the late Heinz Gerischer who pioneered the field of photoelectrochemistry, photoelectrochemical solar cells and the related interface science. The scope of the meeting encompassed the fundamental aspects of semiconductor electrochemistry, include combined fuel generating systems and address the surface science at these solid-liquid junctions.

Download Program and Abstract Booklet

Gerischer also studied a series of photoactive interfaces, providing another emphasis of the Symposium on the development of novel materials and new combinations for various energy conversion. His concept of decomposition potentials directly addresses a main challenge of energy conversion at a reactive interface: stability, which will be a topic of focus as well. Presentations highlighted present advances in surface- and interface science, including in-situ and operando techniques, which allow us new and deepened insight into semiconductors and catalytic processes, especially through the use of soft and tender x-rays at synchrotron.

Accordingly, the Gerischer Today meeting addressed the processes, the materials and the interfaces in photoelectrochemical systems and was broadly open to the interested community. The Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) in Boulder, Colorado hosted the Symposium and it was co-organized with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max Planck Society (FHI) where Prof. Gerischer was affiliated.

An international array of participants and speakers participated in this three day Symposium that begab on the afternoon of August 14, 2018 and ran through to noon on August 16. This conference included a half-day tutorial session, taught by Prof. Lewis, Dr. Spitler, and Prof. Parkinson, on Gerischer electrochemistry, that was held on the morning of August 14.

Event Sponsors

Invited Speakers

Harry Atwater
Shane Ardo
Neal Armstrong
Marcus Baer
Emily Carter
Kyoung-Shin Choi
Ethan Crumlin
Lars Gundlach
Thomas Hannappel
Prashant Kamat
Nathan Lewis
Tim Lian
Arthur Nozik
Krishnan Rajeshwar
Yogesh Surendranath
William Tumas
Patrick Unwin
Brandon Wood
Stephen Maldonado
Nathan Neale
Bruce Parkinson
James Durrant
Ian Sharp

Conference Committee

Co-Chairs:

Joachim Lewerenz
Arthur J. Nozik
Mark T. Spitler

Organizing Committee:

Bruce Parkinson
Neal Armstrong
Laurie Peter
Daniel Esposito
Shane Ardo
Steve Maldonado
Ian Sharp
Gordana Dukovic
Kyoung-Shin Choi
Nathan Neale
Krishnan Rajeshwar
Nathan Lewis
Carl Koval
Katherine Ayers

08/14/2018 - 08/16/2018

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