Descripción del proyecto
Un microscopio holográfico sin parangón arroja luz sobre los fotomateriales orgánicos
La eficiencia de las celdas fotovoltaicas ha aumentado muchísimo en los últimos decenios. La reducción de los costes de los materiales será esencial para conseguir la adopción generalizada de esta tecnología. Una posible solución para lograrlo consistiría en emplear materiales orgánicos e híbridos en lugar de materiales inorgánicos convencionales como, por ejemplo, el silicio. Sin embargo, la morfología heterogénea de estos materiales, fundamental para su funcionalidad, ha dificultado la caracterización experimental de los procesos ultrarrápidos a nanoescala que favorecen. En el proyecto HOLOFAST, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, se pretende emplear su nuevo microscopio holográfico con iluminación estructurada no lineal para esclarecer esta cuestión. El microscopio, que cuenta con una resolución temporal de 10 femtosegundos y 50 nanómetros, además de un amplio campo visual, podría ayudar a explicar por fin los procesos de separación y extracción de cargas en grandes superficies de muestreo.
Objetivo
Solution-processed organic and hybrid materials have immense promise for low-cost photovoltaic devices. Their intrinsically heterogeneous morphology directly impacts the photophysical processes that happen over multiple timescales down to femtoseconds and which ultimately define functionality, such as carrier diffusion, charge separation and recombination. Currently, experimental techniques that can simultaneously study the nanoscale morphology and the ultrafast photophysics are limited. Ultrafast microscopes are restricted to single point or very small fields of view, lacking the large sample area coverage needed to place observations in their proper statistical context. Moreover, they are generally incompatible with super-resolution imaging, preventing the required nanoscale spatial resolution from being achieved. Recently, I introduced a widefield transient holographic microscope using off-axis holography that has shot-noise limited performance and can image large sample areas. Importantly, this approach is compatible with nonlinear structured illumination, a widefield super-resolution technique based on combining a spatially structured illumination pattern and a nonlinear sample response, with the spatial resolution being only limited by how many nonlinear terms can be acquired.
In HOLOFAST, my team and I will combine the new ultrafast holographic microscope with nonlinear structured illumination to bring unprecedented photophysical knowledge of organic photovoltaic materials, with temporal resolution down to 10 femtoseconds, spatial resolution down to 50 nm while simultaneously imaging ~100 micron areas, correlating morphology with excited state dynamics. This will enable us to finally reveal the heterogeneity of charge separation and extraction processes over large sample areas. HOLOFAST will create a photophysical and morphological database that will be valuable to understand and solve the problems that currently limit device efficiencies and lifetimes.
Ámbito científico
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Régimen de financiación
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitución de acogida
00185 Roma
Italia