Artificial photosynthesis represents a promising pathway toward sustainable fuel production, which includes reactions such as water splitting, CO₂ reduction, and organic oxidations to value-added products. A fundamental understanding of the material properties is needed to provide insights into the factors affecting light absorption, catalysis, or degradation mechanisms, which are key for translating this technology from the laboratory scale to practical systems. Accordingly, this symposium will focus on advances in our understanding of the material properties, interfaces, and surfaces of emerging, established, and prospective semiconductors during photochemical and photoelectrochemical reactions or in comparable environments. As such, submissions are particularly welcome on topics including operando material characterization, material and interface modeling, spectroscopic insights into charge recombination, charge transfer and reaction kinetics, and new approaches to material design and discovery. These considerations are applicable to most light absorber families, therefore focused sessions will be dedicated to traditional (oxide, carbon nitride) photo- and photoelectrocatalysts, as well as to chalcogenides, metal halide perovskites, and polymer materials with good prospects. We also welcome submissions from the wider photovoltaics and optoelectronics fields with an emphasis on materials studied under operation in relatively harsh environments of elevated humidity or under reducing/oxidizing atmospheres. The symposium aims to attract a broad audience of researchers working in solar energy conversion on thin film, quantum dot, and other nanostructured light harvesting materials studied in solution and gas-phase environments, making it a fertile ground for cross-disciplinary exchanges that might inspire new material design and characterization directions in solar fuel synthesis.

corrosion luminescence operando optical properties reactivity surface chemistry