Summary of the talk
One of the great challenges facing our society today is the supply of low-cost and environmentally friendly energy sources that can meet the growing demands of an expanding population.
Solar Photovoltaic (PV) is one of the main renewable energy technologies to achieve the goals defined in the EU Energy Roadmap for 2050. This drives research both on new sustainable and stable materials and on new designs of solar cells that can be used for different purposes, both outdoors and indoors. In particular, thin-film solar cells have the flexibility of being able to use them for all these purposes, and, therefore, they will be key in the integration of photovoltaics in residential, industrial and commercial (BIPV) buildings.
In addition, in recent years, the so-called agrovoltaic or agrophotovoltaic has emerged that allows agricultural production of crops and PV generation of electricity on the same land. On the other hand, the massive industrial deployment of IoT (Internet of Things), with the installation of wireless sensor nodes on the ground, is giving an important boost to the development of specific photovoltaics for indoor environments (IPV: Indoor PV).

For all the aforementioned applications, it is necessary to develop a new generation of efficient, low-cost photovoltaic devices with high robustness and stability, with thin-film chalcogenide technology being a great candidate.

In this seminar there will be a review of the evolution of chalcogenide thin-film cells starting with the most efficient today based on Cu(In,Ga)Se2 up to new proposals and emerging materials. In addition, the excellent properties of chalcogenides mean that their interest is not exclusive for photovoltaic applications, but also in many other fields of photonics, etc.

Raquel Caballero is currently a Senior Scientist at the Daza de Valdés Institute of Optics, CSIC. She has a degree in Physics from the University of Granada and a PhD in Physics from the Autonomous University of Madrid. She was an FPI fellow at CIEMAT where she did her doctoral thesis on chalcopyrite materials for thin film solar cells. She subsequently completed a 2-year postdoctoral stay at the Hahn-Meitner-Institut in Berlin (HMI) with a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science. After completing the fellowship, she was hired as a scientist by the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB), formerly HMI, working with high-efficiency flexible CIGSe solar cells for different applications, including space and reaching a world record for efficiency. After more than six and a half years in Germany, Ramón y Cajal joined the Department of Applied Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) as a contractor, beginning to work with abundant materials in the earth’s crust and with low toxicity for photovoltaic applications. highlighting kesterite, leading this line of research. Subsequently, she would work in the same department as a PhD Contracted Professor (I3) continuing with the line of research on sustainable materials, expanding the range of applications. Throughout her scientific career, she has participated in numerous national and international research projects, being Principal Investigator in 6 of them, making stays in different foreign centers such as the Swiss institute EMPA among others. She is the co-author of more than 100 scientific articles published in international journals, has participated in more than 100 international conferences, and supervises different PhD, Master’s, and Bachelor’s students. During his teaching years, he has taught classes in Physics, Chemistry, Computer Engineering and Chemical Engineering at the UAM, as well as in the Master’s Degree in Energy and Fuels for the Future and in the Master’s Degree in Advanced Materials, Nanotechnology and Photonics, being the coordinator of the latter in the last two years.

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