Rubicon Fellowship for dr. Roel Tempelaar

Roel Tempelaar received a prestigious NWO Rubicon Fellowship for his proposal "Splitting Sunlight". The grant will allow him to continue his career at Columbia University in New York.

Roel performed his PhD research on "Spectroscopic signatures of excited state dynamics in organic materials" in the Theory of Condensed Matter group with Jasper Knoester and Thomas La Cour Jansen. He received his PhD (cum laude) in October 2015.

In his thesis, Roel studied the physics of photosynthesis using a simplified model in order to improve the efficiency of man-made solar cells. His Rubicon fellowship builds up on his previous work and will focus on the improvement of standard solar cells, where 70% of the energy from the sun is lost due to lack of absorption or heating effects. These losses prohibit the invention of better photovoltaic systems.
A limiting factor of current solar cells is that high-energy light cannot be absorbed efficiently. Roel will develop a theory for materials that can split high-energy photons into packages of lower energy so that efficient absorption is still possible.