This talk reviews four different areas where adapting academic physics methods and knowledge proved to be very useful for developing better solar cells. (1) Our knowledge of strongly interacting electrons helped boosting the efficiency of energy conversion in quantum dot solar cells by “multiple electron generation”. (2) Work on the Metal-Insulator Transition was useful to improve charge extraction from quantum dot solar cells. (3) Ideas from quantum glassy dynamics helped mitigating the performance degradation of the next generation heterojunction silicon solar cells. In this study Machine Learning techniques were very helpful to model defect dynamics in silicon solar cells. (4) The theory of phase separation formed the basis for understanding how the next generation topcon solar cells degrade.

Website of the Szilárd Colloquium: https://physics.bme.hu/kollokvium?language=hu