Scaling Up, One Interface at a Time: Deposition Strategies for Wide-Bandgap Perovskite Photovoltaics

By Subhashri Mannar 

Abstract

Wide-bandgap (WBG) perovskites are central to next-generation photovoltaics, both as high-efficiency single-junction devices and as the top cell in perovskite/silicon tandems that have reached a certified 34.6% power conversion efficiency. Nearly all of this progress, however, relies on spin-coating: a technique fundamentally incompatible with large-area, industrial manufacturing. Translating any given interface in the device stack from spin-coating to a scalable deposition method typically comes at the cost of performance, stability, or both. This talk presents three complementary strategies developed to close that gap, one interface at a time: capillary-assisted coating of the bottom hole-selective contact, enabling material- and equipment-efficient scaling from 0.1 cm² to 105 cm² modules; blade-coating of the perovskite absorber with an engineered buried 2D/3D heterojunction, enabling the first certified blade-coated perovskite/silicon tandem at 31.2% efficiency; and solvent vapor annealing of vacuum-evaporated top-surface passivation, recovering solution-processed device quality from an otherwise solvent-free, scalable deposition route. Together, these results outline a path toward a wide-bandgap perovskite device stack built entirely from manufacturable deposition techniques, without sacrificing the performance benchmarks set by lab-scale processing.

Biography

Subhashri Mannar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Materials Science and Engineering program at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, where she is conducting research under the mentorship of Prof. Stefaan De Wolf in the KAUST Photovoltaics Laboratory (KPV-LAB). Her research focuses on scalable deposition and interface engineering strategies for wide-bandgap perovskite solar cells and perovskite/silicon tandems, bridging lab-scale device performance with industrially manufacturable fabrication techniques.

Hybrid Copper–Iodide Scintillators: Mechanisms and Applications

By Wentao Wu

Abstract

Scintillators which convert high-energy radiation such as X-rays into visible light, are essential for medical, industrial, and security detection, yet conventional inorganic scintillators are costly, often toxic, and offer limited compositional tunability. Hybrid copper(I) iodides combine strong X-ray attenuation, high emission efficiency, low toxicity, and low cost, but their scintillation efficiency depends sensitively on poorly understood structural details, and their integration into large-area screens remains challenging. Here, we advance hybrid Cu–I scintillators through ligand and core strategies, boosting the light yields and reveal their behind mechanism. Besides, room-temperature solution vitrification also introduced, producing large, transparent cluster glasses with excellent spatial resolution, outperforming many melt-quenched glass scintillators. Together, these results establish design principles and scalable fabrication routes for low-cost, large-area, high-resolution X-ray imaging screens.

Biography

Wentao Wu is a Ph.D. researcher in Materials Science and Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), working in the group of Prof. Omar F. Mohammed. His research focuses on the design and understanding of Cu(I) halide cluster-based scintillators and other emissive metal–halide materials, with particular emphasis on structure–property relationships and excited-state dynamics. His work combines materials synthesis, single-crystal and powder X-ray diffraction, steady-state and time-resolved photoluminescence and radioluminescence spectroscopy, and X-ray imaging to elucidate exciton generation, localization, and recombination mechanisms under optical and X-ray excitation. Before joining KAUST, he obtained his M.Sc. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he investigated two-dimensional perovskites, including their electronic structure, charge-carrier dynamics, and photodetector applications. His research has been published in journals including Journal of the American Chemical Society, Chem, Light: Science & Applications, and Advanced Science.