Lectures will begin on Monday morning (9:00) and end Friday noon (12:00). Two poster sessions will be organized, and daily tutorials will be proposed. The final program will be available soon.
The goal of this program and the school is to build on basic science to challenge the notion of high-performance in PV, and the performance of each technology.
Lectures – day#1-day#4
Basic PV Science – day#1
PV is at the crossroad of many scientific fields, where similar questions can be addressed in different terms. The first lectures of the week aim at building a shared ground on which further presentations will be carried. Starting from a most simple solar cell (Shockley-Queisser limit), non-idealities are progressively introduced to highlight some of the main issues faced by every PV technology. Transverse notions, such as absorptivity, transport, lifetime, selectivity and reciprocity, will be introduced and linked to solar cell performances. An overview of PV technologies (Si, III-V, CIGS, CdTe, perovskite, organic) will highlight the common points and main differences of major sectors.
Interface science in PV – day#2-day#4
The School will then turn to the multi-faceted notion of interface, with renowned experts from the field.
- Daniel Abou-Ras (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin): grain boundaries in polycrystalline absorbers (CIGS, CdTe)
- Amaury Delamarre (C2N, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay): interfaces in III-V devices – Band alignment, lattice matching, alloys
- Stefaan de Wolf (KAUST): interfaces in silicon and silicon/perovskite tandem cells
- Jenny Nelson (Imperial College, UK): non planar interfaces, organic semiconductors
- Thomas Riedl (University of Wuppertal): characterization of interfaces
- Nathanaelle Schneider (IPVF, CNRS): encapsulation & passivation
- Daniel Suchet (IPVF, Ecole Polytechnique), Jean-François Guillemoles (IPVF, CNRS), Andrea Cattoni (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), Stéphane Collin (C2N, CNRS): Basic PV Science
Active learning – day#1-day#5
More information to come.
Tutorials – day#1-day#5
A daily slot will be devoted to tutorials. Working in small groups under the supervision of lecturers, participants will have the chance to put lectures in practice with hands-on problems inspired by research situations.
Poster session – day#1, day#2
Two poster sessions will give participants the occasion to present their activities (research topics, experimental platforms, projects…). Authors are invited to include an “open problem” section in their poster, to share unsolved issues and possibly benefit from discussions with other participants and lecturers. Furthermore, a poster-related game will be organized to encourage participants to discover new topics.
A debate on Sufficiency will be organized with Mathias Guérineau (Nantes Université) on day#3 (evening).
Provisional program (upcoming)
Physics of Solar Cells: from basic principles to interface science
25-29 May 2026, Les Houches School of Physics
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