Materials design and fabrication for light sensing, energy efficiency, solar electricity production, and CO₂ capture and reduction

Abstract:

The global community has made major advances in developing and deploying materials – from quantum dots to 2D materials to perovskites and high-entropy alloys – for applications in sustainability. I will overview some of our group’s recent contributions, focusing especially on light detection [1], LEDs [2], perovskite solar cells [3] including tandem [4] and triple-junction photovoltaics [5], and CO₂ capture and upgrade [6].

[1] A. Najarian, … E. H. Sargent, “Homomeric chains of intermolecular bonds scaffold octahedral germanium perovskites,” Nature, 2023.

[2] D. Ma, … E. H. Sargent, “Distribution control enables efficient reduced-dimensional perovskite LEDs,” Nature, 2022.

[3] S. M. Park, … E. H. Sargent, “Engineering ligand reactivity enables high-temperature operation of stable perovskite solar cells,” Nature, 2023.

[4] R. Lin, … E. H. Sargent, H. Tan, “All-perovskite tandem solar cells with improved grain surface passivation,” Nature, 2022.

[5] Z. Wang, … E. H. Sargent, “Suppressed phase segregation for triple-junction perovskite solar cells,” Nature, 2023.

[6] J. Jin, J. Wicks, … E. H. Sargent, Y. Pang, “Constrained C₂ adsorbate orientation enables CO-to-acetate electroreduction,” Nature 2023.

Biography:

Ted Sargent is the Lynn Hopton Davis and Greg Davis Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. His publications have been cited over 100,000 times and 160 of his papers have been cited 160 times or more. From 1998-2022 he was at the University of Toronto, where he had served 2016-2021 as Vice President – International and Vice President – Research.