Zeno Karl Schindler Award 2018 – Ibrahim Dar

"For his ground-breaking investigations of the outstanding opto-electronic properties of metal-halide perovskites which show great promise as light harvesting materials for low cost and high-efficiency solar cells."

To meet the energy consumption demands, mankind is immensely dependent on burning fossils and petroleum which leads to the global warming. All this alarms us to find renewable, benign, and abundant alternative energy sources. Arguably, solar energy, one of the greenest sources of energy, offers great promise as the amount of radiation that earth receives in a day is more than sufficient to meet our energy consumption demands for an entire year. Dr. Dar has been designing and investigating various materials for their applications in the fabrication of low-cost solar cells. At EPFL, Dr. Dar systematically studied a correlation between the local structure, growth, local composition and optoelectronic properties of materials, and their impact on the performance of resulting solar cells. Using a combination of advanced techniques, Dr. Dar put forth a new conversion chemistry, discovered unusual photophysical properties of perovskite materials, and made a key discovery while identifying the degradation of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and exploited them in fabricating highly-efficient and stable PSCs employing cheap components, which will promote the large-scale deployment of PSCs. Dr. Dar aims to continue exploring newer materials for their application in the fabrication of cheap and efficient light harnessing and light emitting devices.