The project Next Generation Perovskite Photovoltaic Devices is a project within the Partnership Area Energy Transition (AA-Ener-3, 01/2026-12/2028) of the Berlin Mathematics Research Center MATH+ (DFG excellence cluster EXC-2046/1, project ID: 390685689), headed jointly by researchers from HZB (Christiane Becker) and ZIB (Sven Burger, Andrea Walther).
Photovoltaics (PV) installations reached a global capacity of two terawatt by November 2024, at high rates of growth and cost reduction. However, for further growth of PV, which is necessary for mitigation of climate change, research and technological advances are indispensible. PV relies on converting energy from solar photons to electrical energy. Therefore, optical technologies and optical material research play a crucial role in advancing PV. Topics of high current interest include optical concepts, like nanotextures and metamaterials, reduction of parasitic absorption, multijunction solar cells, and shaping of the solar spectrum, as well as color appearance for building integrated PV, light management in multijunction cells, and luminescent coupling.
State-of-the-art PV devices consist of a complex architecture of various structured layers of semiconductor materials and other materials with specific physical properties. The dimensions of all these layers can be fabricated with nanometer scale accuracies. However, for the design of these structures with a number of free parameters, numerical simulation and optimization methods are required. This can be problematic due to a moderately high number of free parameters, and due to the computationally costly solution of the forward problem.
We aim to develop, investigate, and apply methods for highly efficient optimization of photovoltaic (PV) devices. It is planned that the project partner HZB will experimentally realize perovskite PV devices, based on numerical designs obtained with the data based optimization methods developed in this project.
