Harnessing the Sun by Howard Burton

Author:Howard Burton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Physics, Environmental Science, Public Policy
Publisher: Open Agenda Publishing
Published: 2021-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Questions for Discussion:

Are you surprised at the way Jenny had to effectively set her own research agenda from a young age? To what extent do you think this might have helped her scientific career?

How might the way we classify many materials change profoundly in the next 20 years?

IV. Models vs. Labs

An intriguing balance

HB: As you were talking both about your own work and that of others, I found myself frequently wondering how much of this sort of thing can be done on computer simulations as opposed to going into a lab.

I don’t, quite frankly, pretend to understand either of those worlds particularly well, and I appreciate—at least to some extent—that things are often very complicated and there are often many different variables involved, not all of which are even known or assessed, let alone their interactions.

But I’m guessing that at some level there is a division in terms of those who model things with computer simulations and those who work more in the lab directly playing with these materials. But I’m really just speculating.

How does it work for you? I presume you’re more on the computer simulation side of things, but perhaps that’s not actually true. Do you spend equal amounts of time playing around with things in the lab?

JN: Well, I’m very much of the persuasion that computer modelling has a role to play, but I’d equally strongly say that what you get out of a model has to be validated against experiments, otherwise it’s more or less worthless.

My training, my background is in computer modelling and that was my way into solar cells but at some point I started to supervise students who would go into the lab. I don’t go into the lab very often myself for my own research—I have done it, but it’s not where my training is—but about half of my group will be doing experimental work and half doing simulation; and some of them, more exceptionally, will be able to do both quite comfortably.

There are many people who would like to do both, but usually, the experiment wins in terms of consuming their time.

In the area of making solar cells with molecular materials, computer simulations are potentially very helpful, because the family of materials that you might have is infinite.

If you go back to the old days when there were just a few semiconductors—you needed to understand silicon and germanium and gallium arsenide and so forth—but it certainly wouldn’t be a trivial task to say, “I want a new, stable, solid-state compound semiconductor,” and then ask a computer what atoms you should choose and how you should arrange them.

That’s a difficult task. But it’s much easier to say, “I’ve got carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, oxygen; which conjugated molecules should I make that will have a band gap of 1.4 eV?”

This, you can do with a computer just because, while in every case you have to solve Schrödinger’s equation and so on, but they’re smaller systems.

The beauty from the point of view of the

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