December 9, 2024 • 19 mins
Materials scientists and engineers are working to develop and advance materials and devices that harvest energy from light, resulting in more efficient solar cell technologies. In this episode of the "NSF's Discovery Files" podcast, Aram Amassian, a professor at North Carolina State University, discusses light technologies and developing more efficient perovskite solar cells.
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(00:03):
This is The Discovery Files podcastfrom the U.S.
National Science Foundation.
Efficiency
is important in modern and futureelectronic devices.
Materials scientistsand engineers are working to develop
an advanced materials and devicesthat harvest energy from light,
resulting in more efficient solarcell technologies.
(00:24):
We're joined by Aram Amassian, a professorin the Department of Materials Science
and Engineeringat North Carolina State University,
where his research groupis working with electronic, optoelectronic
and photovoltaic materials and devices,including perovskite solar cells.
Professor Amassian,thank you for joining me today.
It's great to be with you, Nate.
I'd like to start
with a little bit of background, andI want to hear a bit about your journey.
(00:46):
How did you become interestedin material science?
It's all started when I was an undergrad,
and I had the opportunityto do some summer research,
and in that summer research,I was given an instrument,
a tool that allowed me to see materialsforming in real time.
And as the materials will forming,I observe some textbook behavior.
(01:08):
But I also observed behaviorthat was unusual.
And so I think that was an eyeopening moment.
It was very interesting.
It was kind of a eureka moment.
I felt that I was the only personwho had seen that behavior,
which in retrospect,turned out to be true.
And I decided to pursue researchin that direction.
And it also showed methe power of scientific instrumentation
(01:32):
and really kind of litthe fire in my belly.
Material science
in your lab deals with a lot of materials,and there's a couple kinds.
Specifically, I want to ask youabout to start things off
and kind of make the concepts of themunderstandable for people.
And that's photovoltaic materialsand optoelectronic materials.
Can you kind of broadly describewhat we're talking about there?
(01:54):
So photovoltaic materials
broadly speaking, are materialsthat convert light into electricity.
So they're very important materials
from a societal perspectivewe think about renewable energy.
So photovoltaic materials are importantpart of the energy mix.
When we think about solar panels todaythat's kind of first generation
(02:14):
photovoltaic technologyprimarily based on wafers.
Second generation photovoltaic technologyis based on thin film.
Celeste's material crystallization,the ability to have flexible photovoltaics
and kind of emerging materials coming intothat as well.
We'll talk about
some of those emerging materialslike perovskites and organics and so on.
(02:35):
And then you have third generationtechnologies where you kind of mix
and match those technologies together,and try to push the efficiency
well beyond what is possiblewith a single material
into kind of beyond the Shockley quasarlimit in terms of efficiencies.
And that's kind of a frontierof photovoltaics research.
Out on the flip side of this,you can also take a lot of these materials
(02:59):
or other materials,and you can also use them differently.
Instead of convertinglight into electricity,
you can inject electricityand convert it into light.
And so now we're talking about lightemission devices like LEDs
used in the displaythat our audience is probably watching.
Or they might be using a smartphoneto listen that the display on that
(03:23):
smartphone is using LEDs.
A teacher might be using a laser pointerthat's using optoelectronic technology,
that's converting the battery powerin that laser pointer into a laser
light source. Right.
So you mentioned perovskites there.
That's the next, area we need to explore.
What are perovskites andwhy are they of interest for researchers.
(03:45):
Perovskites have been around for a very,very long time.
In fact they were discoveredin the 19th centuries.
But they're coming many different flavorsbecause actually perovskite
is a general formula.
It's an AB x3 formula.
And it's the most famous
solar cell that's kind of part of thisrenaissance in perovskites for renewable
(04:06):
energy is actually based onwhat's called a hybrid perovskite
based on lead as the metalin that material in the B position.
And so it turns out that in orderto stabilize
this, perovskite lead is quite large.
And you need to have the right size atomsin order to stabilize it.
(04:27):
And back in the day in the 1970s,a scientist
by the name of Dieter Weberreplaced the cesium, which is the largest
monovalent cationthat you could have into a site.
You replace itwith essentially a synthetic cation,
an organic cation,which is a tri methyl ammonium ion.
And that createdthe first hybrid perovskite.
(04:50):
Now it wasn't explored for decades.
The first exploration of this material.
You know, I'm at NC state very,very close by at Duke University
is one of the first peoplewho kind of really explored it
for technology applications.
David Mitzie,he studied it for transistors,
for LEDsand then kind of exploded from there.
And it was a meteoric rise.
(05:11):
And, you know, now reaching 26%in a single junction device.
So it's really remarkable.
What's makes it really exciting
is the factthat you have these synthetic cations.
So for peoplewho are into material discovery,
it opens up a whole universeof possibilities.
And because you can also not just have
one replacement,you can have multiple A-side cations,
(05:35):
you can have multiple B side metals,and you can have, of course, the halide
and the excite to really tunethe material properties.
Now, not only is it exciting to try theseto tune
the band gap of the materials,but it's also an imperative.
The third generationsolar technology is about creating
what's called multi junctionsolar cells tandems, where you're trying
(05:58):
to harvest different partsof the solar spectrum
in order to create much higher efficiencysolar power.
In order to do that, you have to now finetuned bandgap of the perovskite material.
You do that by engineeringthe composition, and once you do that,
you need to create an alloy or a compoundthat is really stable.
And so it is imperativefor materials science engineers
(06:22):
to fine tunethe composition of the A-side,
the b side and the excitenot only still have the right properties,
but to have a materialthat's extremely stable at temperature,
under illumination,under voltage, and for decades.
And that instabilityis kind of one of the issues
with the current generation of perovskitesolar cells, right?
(06:43):
That's right.
And one of the things that my group
and other groups around the worldhave found
that'sfascinating is the fact that perovskites,
they're ionic semiconductors,
which means that components are formingkind of a ceramic.
And in so doing, the defects are formedwithin the components
(07:06):
within the perovskitematerial are charged.
And so under voltage, for example,you will have migration
of these charged ionstowards the opposite electrode.
You will also have phenomenalike electrochemistry happening.
And so those are complicated phenomena
that you do not think ofin the context of silicon, for example.
(07:28):
So now we have to kind of develop
the scientific understandingand engineering solutions to this.
But on the opposite side of this problem
is an opportunity, which is the factthat these materials are ionic
means that they can also be solutionprocesses built with polar solvents.
So you can actually manufacturethese materials
using liquid based solutions.
(07:51):
That is one of the appealsof this technology.
Once we can harness it and control it,it is amenable to very, potentially very,
very low cost, large area manufacturing,
which is actually one of the thingsthat excites technologists.
Right. And the market's considerably.
The study that brought your work to
my attention is involvinglayered hybrid perovskites.
(08:13):
Can you talk a little bit about thatand how they might be useful.
If hybrid perovskites, the ABC's feestructure was not complicated enough.
Let's throw in another cation.
And this one is a little bit larger.
So the ABCs treestructure forms a nice cube.
Or it's a trigonal structure.
For example for simplicity.
(08:34):
And now imagine that we
we throw on a larger cation molecule
at a site like similar to the site,but it's too large to fit in.
And so what that does, it kind of breaksthe structure up into slabs.
So we have slabs of the perovskite,and then they're separated
by layers of this cation which decoratesthe surface of these slabs.
(08:56):
And you have alternatinglayers of metal halide perovskite slabs.
What's interesting is thatwithin the confines of these slabs,
you have the ability to move chargesand so on.
And the cationthat kind of decorating them is
providing issomething of what's called a confinement.
(09:17):
That's also on a very,very small scale on the nanometer scale.
So much so that the electrons in thatmaterial experience quantum confinement.
And that is actually very excitingfrom the perspective
of applicationslike displays and LEDs and lasers.
And so that's on the optoelectronic side.
Right.
So there's a lot of interest in harnessinglayered perovskites
(09:40):
for the purpose of,of being able to inject charge
in a very controlled manner, controllingalso the size of these confined quantum
wells essentially control the emissioncolor and control how the energy moves
inside the material.
And one of the discoveries that we made inthat study is around
the topic of how exactly these layer typeperovskites form.
(10:04):
Now, these layered hybrid perovskitesalso work
very effectivelyin solar cell applications.
As long as you can get those slabsto form vertically,
because in a solar panelyou have a structure where you have
two electrodes at the top and the bottom,and those are your current collectors.
So as long as the slabs are vertical,the charges can move very, very quickly up
(10:27):
and down to where the current collectors
in the cation layers are not blockingthe charge collection.
And it turns out that
in that context, layered perovskitesalso have more stable structure.
And they seem to actually addresssome of the stability
concerns that traditional perovskiteshave.
Is it hardgetting them to grow vertically?
(10:47):
Like is that part of the trick, getting itto what direction and controlling
how the wells form?
It has been one of the challengesto get them to grow vertically.
And I think that over the last few years,the community has come to understand
that they don't grow from the bottom up,they grow from the top down.
That's kind of beenone of the contributions of our study,
(11:10):
which is to show how you have thisinitially a seed layer
that forms at the very top, that initiatesthe formation of all of these quantum
wells, whether they formhorizontally or vertically.
The sequence in which they form.
And yeah, I would say that
there is some understanding inin how that happens, but there isn't
a comprehensive picture yet of exactlyhow to control that orientation.
(11:33):
So there's still some work to be donein that sense.
One of the other projects you worked onand you sort of mentioned earlier there
being organic solar cells, can you talka little bit about what that means?
So organic solar cells essentiallyhave no inorganic components like lead.
They're typically using polymers mostly
carbon based,that sometimes include sulfur
(11:56):
and oxygen and nitrogen and fourand so lighter elements.
These are all essentially synthesizedand they're also solution processed.
And this is a technologythat has evolved over the last few decades
to get to a pointwhere the efficiency has reached 20%.
One of the key characteristicsof this technology, I would say,
(12:18):
is that you can very nicely control
the color spectrum of absorption.
To give you an example,if you think about the dyes on my shirt or
yours or other clothes and those are madewith organic molecules, right?
And you can really pick and choosewhich color you want to have.
And that's not very dissimilarfrom how much organic solar cell is made.
(12:41):
You can have a whole color palette.
So you can now think about designingan organic solar cell
that has a color palette.
And so if you think about, for example,applications like agriculture,
you can design the solar panel to absorbparts of the spectrum, let's say
on a greenhousewhere as you lead in parts of the spectrum
(13:03):
that the plants need, and then you absorbthe rest of the solar spectrum
that are not needed by photosynthesis,for example.
And that part of the, solar spectrum is essentially
harvested to create electricityfor the greenhouse to operate.
Interesting. Right.
So now you have this synergy and symbiosisbetween the greenhouse
(13:26):
and whatever is growing insidethat greenhouse.
So energy is kindof used much more efficiently.
And that would not be possiblewith a technology like perovskites,
which is a much kind of more broadbandabsorber.
It's a very, very good absorberexalt absorber silicon also.
It's just going to absorb everything.
But that doesn't mean that you'regoing to solve all of the world's
(13:47):
energy needs, but you're going to be ableto provide, subsystem
and local energysolutions, for example, for agriculture.
You could also provide this solutionfor building integration.
So into windows,I think that is also a very,
very effective way organicsolar cells can be used.
What difference has NSF supportmade to your career.
(14:10):
Yeah. Thank you for that question.
So it's interesting because I have had aunusual career trajectory after completing
my graduate studies in Canada from Canada,I moved to the United States.
I completed a postdocat Cornell University with George Malley
Harris, Jim Angstrom, spent some time at the Cornell High Energy
Synchrotron Source,which was NSF supported major facility.
(14:34):
And then after I did three yearsthere, I actually moved
overseas,spent nine years of my academic career
at the King AbdullahUniversity of Science and Technology,
where I was actually one of the juniorfounding faculty,
were amongst 70, 75 facultywho started that initiative.
After nine years spent there, I moved hereto North Carolina State University,
(14:58):
and that's kind of where I hadmy first NSF experience.
And the NSF experience for me has been
an opportunityto kind of broaden my perspective.
I have kind of seen how I can create thatspark for undergraduate students,
and the other one has been thinkingabout the type of activity
(15:19):
that I would like to do beyond mymy basic research.
And so when I was at Calsthat was involved with a high school
student mentoring,and when I came to NC state
and I got involved in activities, researchactivities of artificial intelligence
automation, I started to think aboutwhat is the societal impact there,
what could be the outreach activitythat I should
(15:40):
and should develop that really kind ofis it put intersection to kind of start
to think about the synergies there and,and that move towards working with people
with disabilities, thinking of waysin which those technologies
could broaden participation of people
with certain disabilitieswho would not be able to have access
(16:01):
to a laboratory equipment,or being able to do experimental research.
And so that's kind of been a very eyeopening experience.
Right?
It's how do you get it to dothe things that it can do that
you can't do yourself,but use it to leverage the possibility.
Exactly.
And so I think those are some of the areaswhere working with the NSF
(16:21):
has been very rewarding for me.
The last question I had set aside for youtoday is thinking about the future.
What makes you optimistic about the workyou have in the next few years?
I did this work over the last coupleof years in my laboratory,
thinking aboutways in which I could prove to myself
how we could utilize artificialintelligence automation to move forward.
(16:47):
Scientific inquiry.
And I have to say that, you know,I come from a background
where I have deep analytical approachesto the scientific inquiry.
And over the last few years,I've kind of tried to see whether
there is an opportunityto do to use these new methods
and see for myself if we can come upwith new scientific understanding
(17:09):
and how much can we
not just optimize things faster,but can we develop knowledge faster?
We have not published the work yet, but
I have convinced myselfthat it is possible.
So that's something
I'm very keen to pursue furtherand try to demonstrate to the community.
Hopefully some constructive waysin which we can do it,
(17:29):
because I think that if we can showthe next generation of scientists
how we might accelerate the pathto solving important problems,
then it's a constructiveit's a win win for everybody.
And the other thing is
finding ways to do thiswithin the context of our disciplines.
As I kind of alluding to itand with our students,
(17:52):
as opposed to with justartificial intelligence telling us.
So what I mean by that is,you know, we're trying to think about ways
of creating humanand AI machine interactions
that are empowering to the student,empowering to the researcher,
as opposed to interactions that take away
value from the scientific and education
(18:15):
that could that make experiencethat we want to create for our students.
And I think that's kind of a fine balance.
There's still a lot of experimentationto be done there, but I think
if we can create the right tools,then potentially we can harness
those methodsand create value, scientific,
engineering, technological, societal valuein the next few years.
(18:39):
So that's what makes me optimistic.
Special thanks to Aram Amassian,for The Discovery Files, I’m Nate Pottker.
You can watch video versions
of these conversations on our YouTubechannel by searching @NSFscience.
Please subscribe wherever you get podcastsand if you like our program,
share it with a friendand consider leaving a review.
Discover how the U.S.
National Science Foundationis advancing research at NSF.gov Dot gov.
This is The Discovery Files podcastfrom the U.S.
National Science Foundation.
Efficiency
is important in modern and futureelectronic devices.
Materials scientistsand engineers are working to develop
an advanced materials and devicesthat harvest energy from light,
resulting in more efficient solarcell technologies.
(00:24):
We're joined by Aram Amassian, a professorin the Department of Materials Science
and Engineeringat North Carolina State University,
where his research groupis working with electronic, optoelectronic
and photovoltaic materials and devices,including perovskite solar cells.
Professor Amassian,thank you for joining me today.
It's great to be with you, Nate.
I'd like to start
with a little bit of background, andI want to hear a bit about your journey.
(00:46):
How did you become interestedin material science?
It's all started when I was an undergrad,
and I had the opportunityto do some summer research,
and in that summer research,I was given an instrument,
a tool that allowed me to see materialsforming in real time.
And as the materials will forming,I observe some textbook behavior.
(01:08):
But I also observed behaviorthat was unusual.
And so I think that was an eyeopening moment.
It was very interesting.
It was kind of a eureka moment.
I felt that I was the only personwho had seen that behavior,
which in retrospect,turned out to be true.
And I decided to pursue researchin that direction.
And it also showed methe power of scientific instrumentation
(01:32):
and really kind of litthe fire in my belly.
Material science
in your lab deals with a lot of materials,and there's a couple kinds.
Specifically, I want to ask youabout to start things off
and kind of make the concepts of themunderstandable for people.
And that's photovoltaic materialsand optoelectronic materials.
Can you kind of broadly describewhat we're talking about there?
(01:54):
So photovoltaic materials
broadly speaking, are materialsthat convert light into electricity.
So they're very important materials
from a societal perspectivewe think about renewable energy.
So photovoltaic materials are importantpart of the energy mix.
When we think about solar panels todaythat's kind of first generation
(02:14):
photovoltaic technologyprimarily based on wafers.
Second generation photovoltaic technologyis based on thin film.
Celeste's material crystallization,the ability to have flexible photovoltaics
and kind of emerging materials coming intothat as well.
We'll talk about
some of those emerging materialslike perovskites and organics and so on.
(02:35):
And then you have third generationtechnologies where you kind of mix
and match those technologies together,and try to push the efficiency
well beyond what is possiblewith a single material
into kind of beyond the Shockley quasarlimit in terms of efficiencies.
And that's kind of a frontierof photovoltaics research.
Out on the flip side of this,you can also take a lot of these materials
(02:59):
or other materials,and you can also use them differently.
Instead of convertinglight into electricity,
you can inject electricityand convert it into light.
And so now we're talking about lightemission devices like LEDs
used in the displaythat our audience is probably watching.
Or they might be using a smartphoneto listen that the display on that
(03:23):
smartphone is using LEDs.
A teacher might be using a laser pointerthat's using optoelectronic technology,
that's converting the battery powerin that laser pointer into a laser
light source. Right.
So you mentioned perovskites there.
That's the next, area we need to explore.
What are perovskites andwhy are they of interest for researchers.
(03:45):
Perovskites have been around for a very,very long time.
In fact they were discoveredin the 19th centuries.
But they're coming many different flavorsbecause actually perovskite
is a general formula.
It's an AB x3 formula.
And it's the most famous
solar cell that's kind of part of thisrenaissance in perovskites for renewable
(04:06):
energy is actually based onwhat's called a hybrid perovskite
based on lead as the metalin that material in the B position.
And so it turns out that in orderto stabilize
this, perovskite lead is quite large.
And you need to have the right size atomsin order to stabilize it.
(04:27):
And back in the day in the 1970s,a scientist
by the name of Dieter Weberreplaced the cesium, which is the largest
monovalent cationthat you could have into a site.
You replace itwith essentially a synthetic cation,
an organic cation,which is a tri methyl ammonium ion.
And that createdthe first hybrid perovskite.
(04:50):
Now it wasn't explored for decades.
The first exploration of this material.
You know, I'm at NC state very,very close by at Duke University
is one of the first peoplewho kind of really explored it
for technology applications.
David Mitzie,he studied it for transistors,
for LEDsand then kind of exploded from there.
And it was a meteoric rise.
(05:11):
And, you know, now reaching 26%in a single junction device.
So it's really remarkable.
What's makes it really exciting
is the factthat you have these synthetic cations.
So for peoplewho are into material discovery,
it opens up a whole universeof possibilities.
And because you can also not just have
one replacement,you can have multiple A-side cations,
(05:35):
you can have multiple B side metals,and you can have, of course, the halide
and the excite to really tunethe material properties.
Now, not only is it exciting to try theseto tune
the band gap of the materials,but it's also an imperative.
The third generationsolar technology is about creating
what's called multi junctionsolar cells tandems, where you're trying
(05:58):
to harvest different partsof the solar spectrum
in order to create much higher efficiencysolar power.
In order to do that, you have to now finetuned bandgap of the perovskite material.
You do that by engineeringthe composition, and once you do that,
you need to create an alloy or a compoundthat is really stable.
And so it is imperativefor materials science engineers
(06:22):
to fine tunethe composition of the A-side,
the b side and the excitenot only still have the right properties,
but to have a materialthat's extremely stable at temperature,
under illumination,under voltage, and for decades.
And that instabilityis kind of one of the issues
with the current generation of perovskitesolar cells, right?
(06:43):
That's right.
And one of the things that my group
and other groups around the worldhave found
that'sfascinating is the fact that perovskites,
they're ionic semiconductors,
which means that components are formingkind of a ceramic.
And in so doing, the defects are formedwithin the components
(07:06):
within the perovskitematerial are charged.
And so under voltage, for example,you will have migration
of these charged ionstowards the opposite electrode.
You will also have phenomenalike electrochemistry happening.
And so those are complicated phenomena
that you do not think ofin the context of silicon, for example.
(07:28):
So now we have to kind of develop
the scientific understandingand engineering solutions to this.
But on the opposite side of this problem
is an opportunity, which is the factthat these materials are ionic
means that they can also be solutionprocesses built with polar solvents.
So you can actually manufacturethese materials
using liquid based solutions.
(07:51):
That is one of the appealsof this technology.
Once we can harness it and control it,it is amenable to very, potentially very,
very low cost, large area manufacturing,
which is actually one of the thingsthat excites technologists.
Right. And the market's considerably.
The study that brought your work to
my attention is involvinglayered hybrid perovskites.
(08:13):
Can you talk a little bit about thatand how they might be useful.
If hybrid perovskites, the ABC's feestructure was not complicated enough.
Let's throw in another cation.
And this one is a little bit larger.
So the ABCs treestructure forms a nice cube.
Or it's a trigonal structure.
For example for simplicity.
(08:34):
And now imagine that we
we throw on a larger cation molecule
at a site like similar to the site,but it's too large to fit in.
And so what that does, it kind of breaksthe structure up into slabs.
So we have slabs of the perovskite,and then they're separated
by layers of this cation which decoratesthe surface of these slabs.
(08:56):
And you have alternatinglayers of metal halide perovskite slabs.
What's interesting is thatwithin the confines of these slabs,
you have the ability to move chargesand so on.
And the cationthat kind of decorating them is
providing issomething of what's called a confinement.
(09:17):
That's also on a very,very small scale on the nanometer scale.
So much so that the electrons in thatmaterial experience quantum confinement.
And that is actually very excitingfrom the perspective
of applicationslike displays and LEDs and lasers.
And so that's on the optoelectronic side.
Right.
So there's a lot of interest in harnessinglayered perovskites
(09:40):
for the purpose of,of being able to inject charge
in a very controlled manner, controllingalso the size of these confined quantum
wells essentially control the emissioncolor and control how the energy moves
inside the material.
And one of the discoveries that we made inthat study is around
the topic of how exactly these layer typeperovskites form.
(10:04):
Now, these layered hybrid perovskitesalso work
very effectivelyin solar cell applications.
As long as you can get those slabsto form vertically,
because in a solar panelyou have a structure where you have
two electrodes at the top and the bottom,and those are your current collectors.
So as long as the slabs are vertical,the charges can move very, very quickly up
(10:27):
and down to where the current collectors
in the cation layers are not blockingthe charge collection.
And it turns out that
in that context, layered perovskitesalso have more stable structure.
And they seem to actually addresssome of the stability
concerns that traditional perovskiteshave.
Is it hardgetting them to grow vertically?
(10:47):
Like is that part of the trick, getting itto what direction and controlling
how the wells form?
It has been one of the challengesto get them to grow vertically.
And I think that over the last few years,the community has come to understand
that they don't grow from the bottom up,they grow from the top down.
That's kind of beenone of the contributions of our study,
(11:10):
which is to show how you have thisinitially a seed layer
that forms at the very top, that initiatesthe formation of all of these quantum
wells, whether they formhorizontally or vertically.
The sequence in which they form.
And yeah, I would say that
there is some understanding inin how that happens, but there isn't
a comprehensive picture yet of exactlyhow to control that orientation.
(11:33):
So there's still some work to be donein that sense.
One of the other projects you worked onand you sort of mentioned earlier there
being organic solar cells, can you talka little bit about what that means?
So organic solar cells essentiallyhave no inorganic components like lead.
They're typically using polymers mostly
carbon based,that sometimes include sulfur
(11:56):
and oxygen and nitrogen and fourand so lighter elements.
These are all essentially synthesizedand they're also solution processed.
And this is a technologythat has evolved over the last few decades
to get to a pointwhere the efficiency has reached 20%.
One of the key characteristicsof this technology, I would say,
(12:18):
is that you can very nicely control
the color spectrum of absorption.
To give you an example,if you think about the dyes on my shirt or
yours or other clothes and those are madewith organic molecules, right?
And you can really pick and choosewhich color you want to have.
And that's not very dissimilarfrom how much organic solar cell is made.
(12:41):
You can have a whole color palette.
So you can now think about designingan organic solar cell
that has a color palette.
And so if you think about, for example,applications like agriculture,
you can design the solar panel to absorbparts of the spectrum, let's say
on a greenhousewhere as you lead in parts of the spectrum
(13:03):
that the plants need, and then you absorbthe rest of the solar spectrum
that are not needed by photosynthesis,for example.
And that part of the, solar spectrum is essentially
harvested to create electricityfor the greenhouse to operate.
Interesting. Right.
So now you have this synergy and symbiosisbetween the greenhouse
(13:26):
and whatever is growing insidethat greenhouse.
So energy is kindof used much more efficiently.
And that would not be possiblewith a technology like perovskites,
which is a much kind of more broadbandabsorber.
It's a very, very good absorberexalt absorber silicon also.
It's just going to absorb everything.
But that doesn't mean that you'regoing to solve all of the world's
(13:47):
energy needs, but you're going to be ableto provide, subsystem
and local energysolutions, for example, for agriculture.
You could also provide this solutionfor building integration.
So into windows,I think that is also a very,
very effective way organicsolar cells can be used.
What difference has NSF supportmade to your career.
(14:10):
Yeah. Thank you for that question.
So it's interesting because I have had aunusual career trajectory after completing
my graduate studies in Canada from Canada,I moved to the United States.
I completed a postdocat Cornell University with George Malley
Harris, Jim Angstrom, spent some time at the Cornell High Energy
Synchrotron Source,which was NSF supported major facility.
(14:34):
And then after I did three yearsthere, I actually moved
overseas,spent nine years of my academic career
at the King AbdullahUniversity of Science and Technology,
where I was actually one of the juniorfounding faculty,
were amongst 70, 75 facultywho started that initiative.
After nine years spent there, I moved hereto North Carolina State University,
(14:58):
and that's kind of where I hadmy first NSF experience.
And the NSF experience for me has been
an opportunityto kind of broaden my perspective.
I have kind of seen how I can create thatspark for undergraduate students,
and the other one has been thinkingabout the type of activity
(15:19):
that I would like to do beyond mymy basic research.
And so when I was at Calsthat was involved with a high school
student mentoring,and when I came to NC state
and I got involved in activities, researchactivities of artificial intelligence
automation, I started to think aboutwhat is the societal impact there,
what could be the outreach activitythat I should
(15:40):
and should develop that really kind ofis it put intersection to kind of start
to think about the synergies there and,and that move towards working with people
with disabilities, thinking of waysin which those technologies
could broaden participation of people
with certain disabilitieswho would not be able to have access
(16:01):
to a laboratory equipment,or being able to do experimental research.
And so that's kind of been a very eyeopening experience.
Right?
It's how do you get it to dothe things that it can do that
you can't do yourself,but use it to leverage the possibility.
Exactly.
And so I think those are some of the areaswhere working with the NSF
(16:21):
has been very rewarding for me.
The last question I had set aside for youtoday is thinking about the future.
What makes you optimistic about the workyou have in the next few years?
I did this work over the last coupleof years in my laboratory,
thinking aboutways in which I could prove to myself
how we could utilize artificialintelligence automation to move forward.
(16:47):
Scientific inquiry.
And I have to say that, you know,I come from a background
where I have deep analytical approachesto the scientific inquiry.
And over the last few years,I've kind of tried to see whether
there is an opportunityto do to use these new methods
and see for myself if we can come upwith new scientific understanding
(17:09):
and how much can we
not just optimize things faster,but can we develop knowledge faster?
We have not published the work yet, but
I have convinced myselfthat it is possible.
So that's something
I'm very keen to pursue furtherand try to demonstrate to the community.
Hopefully some constructive waysin which we can do it,
(17:29):
because I think that if we can showthe next generation of scientists
how we might accelerate the pathto solving important problems,
then it's a constructiveit's a win win for everybody.
And the other thing is
finding ways to do thiswithin the context of our disciplines.
As I kind of alluding to itand with our students,
(17:52):
as opposed to with justartificial intelligence telling us.
So what I mean by that is,you know, we're trying to think about ways
of creating humanand AI machine interactions
that are empowering to the student,empowering to the researcher,
as opposed to interactions that take away
value from the scientific and education
(18:15):
that could that make experiencethat we want to create for our students.
And I think that's kind of a fine balance.
There's still a lot of experimentationto be done there, but I think
if we can create the right tools,then potentially we can harness
those methodsand create value, scientific,
engineering, technological, societal valuein the next few years.
(18:39):
So that's what makes me optimistic.
Special thanks to Aram Amassian,for The Discovery Files, I’m Nate Pottker.
You can watch video versions
of these conversations on our YouTubechannel by searching @NSFscience.
Please subscribe wherever you get podcastsand if you like our program,
share it with a friendand consider leaving a review.
Discover how the U.S.
National Science Foundationis advancing research at NSF.gov Dot gov.
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