Professor Viktor Brus Seminar
Join the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy for a seminar conducted by Professor Viktor Brus, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology
What: "Revealing Interface Recombination and Contact Selectivity Losses in Emerging Photovoltaics through Device Characterization and Computational Imaging"
Who: Viktor Brus, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
When: Wednesday, June 10, 2026 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CT
Where: Ryan Hall, 4003, 2190 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208
Abstract: Emerging photovoltaic technologies, including organic and perovskite solar cells, offer promising routes toward low-cost, lightweight, and tunable energy conversion. However, their performance and stability are often limited by interface recombination, imperfect charge-selective contacts, energetic disorder, and spatial nonuniformity. This talk will discuss how device-physics-based characterization can be used to identify and interpret these hidden loss mechanisms. The first part of the seminar will focus on light-intensity-dependent open-circuit voltage analysis in organic solar cells with intrinsic and doped active layers, highlighting how recombination mechanisms and interfacial effects can be extracted from relatively simple device measurements. The second part will introduce a recently developed contact selectivity imaging approach based on spectrally resolved photoluminescence and electroluminescence imaging. In this method, the ratio-of-ratios image functions as an optoelectronic reciprocity asymmetry map, revealing the spatial distribution of contact-selectivity losses by comparing spectral luminescence signatures under optical excitation and electrical injection while reducing common optical and bulk recombination contributions. Together, these examples illustrate how conventional device characterization and advanced luminescence imaging can be combined to reveal recombination, transport, and contact limitations in emerging photovoltaic devices. Such diagnostic approaches are important not only for achieving high-performance devices, but also for advanced reliability analysis and long-term degradation studies, where spatially resolved identification of evolving interfacial and contact-related losses is essential.
Speaker Biography: Viktor Brus has been an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology since 2026. He earned his Ph.D. in Solid State Electronics from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a Doctor of Sciences degree (Habilitation) in the Physics of Semiconductors and Dielectrics from Chernivtsi National University (Ukraine). Prior to Illinois Tech, he held academic and R&D positions at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (Germany), the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan), and First Solar Inc. (USA). His research focuses on the advanced materials science and physics of emerging organic and perovskite semiconductor devices for terrestrial and space applications. Brus has published over 150 papers in high-impact peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Mater., Advanced Mater., Advanced Energy Mater., Advanced Functional Mater., ACS Energy Letters, Carbon, etc. He serves as an editor for Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing) in the field of electronics and device physics.
Tommy Baker
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