Scientific report “2nd TYC Conference: Charge Transfer for Energy Applications”

Charge transfer underlies the function of many devices ranging from transistors to light-emitting diodes, and from solar to biofuel cells. It is often the limiting factor for the performance of these devices. As such it is absolutely vital to understand the mechanism, thermodynamics and kinetics of this important physical process on a molecular level. Although the time and length scales of the charge transfer that occurs in these devices may be rather different, the inherent dynamics may be similar and indeed be described by similar theoretical approaches. The aim of this workshop was to bring together experimentalists, theorists and computational scientists working on charge transfer within and between (i) organic semiconductors, (ii) thermo-electrics, (iii) dye-sensitised solar cell materials and (iv) semiconducting oxides. The workshop took place from 6. to 8. June 2012 at King’s College London, UK. There were 4 half-day sessions, each dedicated to one of the above topics. The program started with a reception in the evening of June 6. On the following morning the workshop was officially opened by Prof David Richards, Head of Research at King’s College London, followed by the morning session on organic semiconductors and the afternoon session on thermo-electrics. A poster session and buffet was organised for the evening of 7. June. The following day started with a session on dye-sensitised solar cell materials followed by the last session on semiconducting oxides. After the award of a poster prize, Prof Mark Van Schilfgaarde of King’s College, closed the workshop and gave an inspiring outlook into the future of energy research. Workshop papers by invited speakers are currently under peer-review and will be published in a special issue of the journal Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. (RSC Publishing) prospectively in early 2013. We were fortunate that a number of world-leading researchers followed our invitation to deliver talks of exceptional quality, among them Profs Siebbeles, Rossky, Rubio, Galli, Prezhdo, Wolf, Dupuis and Nitzan. We also gave researchers on a more junior-level the opportunity to present results in form of a contributed talk. The quality of these talks was generally very high, which we explain by the large number of applications that we have received and the possibility to select from excellent abstracts. Participants that were not selected for a talk had the opportunity to present a poster. There were 17 invited talks and 9 contributed talks (3 female and 23 male speakers from 9 European countries and the US) as well as 48 poster presentations. The event certainly fostered the dialogue and, as we hope, also the collaboration between experimentalists and theorists on the particularly relevant topic of charge transfer in energy materials, at a time where energy research is more important than ever. Several key issues for future developments were identified in each of the four sub-themes, for instance the need to go beyond hopping models in organic semi-conducting materials, to develop density functionals that go beyond the adiabatic approximation for the description of photo-induced processes and the need to modify existing models for charge transfer in metal-oxide materials. With 124 participants from 13 European countries, the US and Japan attending, this workshop was a successful event that met the objectives set out in our proposal.