From MIT News: “New technique allows simulation of noncrystalline materials”
Multidisciplinary team develops mathematical approach that could help in simulating materials for solar cells and LEDs.
June 22, 2012
David Chandler, MIT News Office
A multidisciplinary team of researchers at MIT and in Spain has found a new mathematical approach to simulating the electronic behavior of noncrystalline materials, which may eventually play an important part in new devices including solar cells, organic LED lights and printable, flexible electronic circuits.
Disordered materials, such as this slice of amorphous silicon (a material often used to make solar cells), have been very difficult to model mathematically. New mathematical methods developed at MIT should help with such modeling. Image: wikimedia commons/Asad856
The research is being reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, published June 29.
Jiahao Chen, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Chemistry and lead author of the report, says that finding this novel approach to simulating the electronic properties of ‘disordered materials’ — those that lack an orderly crystal structure — involved a team of physicists, chemists, mathematicians at MIT and a computer scientist at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
‘There is a lot of interest in how organic semiconductors can be used to make solar cells” as a possible lower-cost alternative to silicon solar cells,’ Chen says. In some types of these devices, ‘All the molecules, instead of being perfectly ordered, are all jumbled up.’ These disordered materials are very difficult to model mathematically, but this new method could be a useful step in that direction, he says.
The research is being reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, published June 29.
See the full article here.
