Optoelectronic devices – including a wide variety of solar cells, smart windows, and light emitting devices – have become increasingly important in our society, driving innovations in materials and device architectures to enable multiple functionalities. In these optoelectronic devices, contact materials and interface formation are taking a dominant role in their performance. Indeed, for many of these applications, modern contacts increasingly need to fulfil multiple electrical functions such as surface passivation, carrier collection/injection, lateral conductivity, and effective contact to the outer device terminals, while being as broadband transparent as possible. Additional constraints may be present such as processing compatibility, overall device stability and reliability, and use of abundant and non-toxic materials. Overall, material design aided by computational and machine learning methods, thin film growth and synthesis, the use of hybrid organic-inorganic materials, interfacial engineering and smart integration of contacts in these devices will open the way to new functionality and improved device efficiency. Together with contact material innovation, novel characterization methods to elucidate the role of the interfaces in device performance will be required to design the next generation of optoelectronic devices.

The goal of this symposium is to bring together a multidisciplinary community of physicists, chemists, materials and device scientists working on optoelectronic materials, interface characterization and devices, to discuss the current and future needs in contacting materials and interfaces, including those used in high-efficiency solar cells based on hybrid halide perovskites, silicon, organic, thin-film and III-V materials.

atomic layer deposition devices electronic structure optoelectronic photovoltaic physical vapor deposition (PVD) simulation spectroscopy transparent conductor