Advent calendar - December 21st - Marten Koopmans

In the Zernike Institute Advent Calendar, we are presenting 24 short spotlights in December. In these specials, we highlight PhD students, postdocs, and technicians of our research groups - providing a glimpse into their typical day at work. In Episode 21 meet Marten Koopmans.

I'm in the final days of my PhD position in the group of Jan Anton Koster. I research charge transport in organic and hybrid semiconductors and employ numerical modeling to find out what effects govern charge transport in these materials. While I originally started working on simulating perovskite solar cells, I switched to doped organic systems using a kinetic Monte-Carlo simulation. We worked on the effects of carrier-carrier interactions on the (thermo)electric performance of doped organic semiconductors. Because of the low dielectric constants in organic materials, these effects can become prominent even around room temperature, giving rise to some interesting effects.

Recently, we started a new project to make our solar cell simulation software open-source. While this takes much more time than anticipated, it is very nice to be working on a project that can potentially benefit many researchers in the field.

Doing computer simulations exclusively can get a little grindy, but luckily, we share our office with bachelor and master students. It is a very pleasant experience to teach them how to work with new physics and simulation methods, especially since they are all from extremely diverse backgrounds. Some code in their spare time and some haven't used anything beyond MS Office, but in the end we find that all of them can pick up the skills required to contribute to our research.

This collaborative research with our fellow group members is really what makes the job most enjoyable.

Contact: Marten Koopmans