The development of advanced photon-based technologies offers exciting promises in fields of crucial importance for the development of sustainable societies such as energy and food management, security and health care. Innovative photonic devices will however reveal their true potential if we can deploy their functionalities not only on rigid wafers, but also over large-area, flexible and stretchable substrates. Indeed, providing energy harvesting, sensing, or stimulating abilities over windows, screens, food packages, wearable textiles, or even biological tissues will be invaluable technological breakthroughs. Today, however, conventional fabrication approaches remain difficult to scale to large area, and are not well adapted to the mechanical and topological requirements of non-rigid and curved substrates. In FLOWTONICS, we propose innovative materials processing approaches and device architectures to enable the simple and scalable fabrication of nano-structured photonic systems compatible with flexible and stretchable substrates. Our strategy is to direct the flow of optical materials through an innovative and thus far unexplored exploitation of the solid-state dewetting and thermal drawing processes. Our objectives are three-fold: (1) Study and demonstrate, for the first time, the strong potential of the dewetting of chalcogenide glasses layers for the fabrication of large area photonic devices; (2) Show that dewetting can also be exploited to realize photonic architectures onto engineered, nano-imprinted flexible and stretchable polymer substrates; (3) Demonstrate, for the first time, the use of the thermal drawing process as a novel tool to realize advanced flexible and stretchable photonic ribbons and fibers. These novel approaches can contribute to game-changing scientific and technological advances for the sustainable management of our resources and to meet our growing health care needs, putting Europe at the forefront of innovation in these crucial areas.
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Widespread adoption of photovoltaics for clean, plentiful and renewable energy requires cheap, efficient and long-lasting solar cells; hybrid perovskite solar cells are promising candidates but suffer from light-induced degradation under operational conditions. Chemical understanding of the photodegradation processes is required to develop stable materials, but is challenging to obtain with existing techniques. Here we propose to study perovskite degradation under in situ light irradiation using high-resolution solid-state NMR. Solid-state NMR is an atomic-scale, element-specific probe of local structure which has recently been shown to provide important information on perovskite systems, however new methodology is required to perform in situ light irradiation. Significantly, many photodefects will be present at low concentrations and/or localised at surfaces; in order to observe these by NMR, in situ light irradiation will be combined with dynamic nuclear polarisation (DNP), whereby the greater polarisation of unpaired electrons boosts the NMR signal. The project is split into three parts: (1) observation of major perovskite photodegradation products under in situ light irradiation that do not require additional sensitivity; (2) adaptation of DNP NMR to perovskites to observe surface passivating species; and (3) combined DNP-enhanced, in situ light-irradiated NMR to observe minor and/or surface photodefects. All three parts represent innovative methodological advances and will provide key chemical information on perovskite structures and degradation processes to guide future development of stable solar cells. The combination of myself and the Emsley lab is ideal to perform this project, through which I will develop the advanced technical and non-technical research skills required for the project to be succesful. The fellowship will expand my international network and result in wide-reaching research output, which will establish me as an independent researcher.
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