Sustainable development of next-generation solar cells and LEDs

by Prof. Feng Gao

Thursday 24 Apr 2025, 15:15 → 16:15 Europe/Stockholm

Solar cells and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are considered as essential components for our sustainable future. We take emerging perovskite semiconductors as an example and demonstrate how we take sustainability into consideration when developing next-generation perovskite-based solar cells and LEDs. For perovskite solar cells, we develop a low-cost, green solvent-based holistic recycling strategy to restore all valuable components from perovskite photovoltaic waste. After repeated degradation-recycling processes, the recycled devices show similar efficiency and stability compared to the fresh devices. Our work highlights unique opportunities of perovskite photovoltaics for holistic recycling and paves the way for sustainable perovskite solar economy. For perovskite LEDs, a unique feature of perovskites is that they can also efficiently detect light, making it possible to develop new applications which are hardly possible for other LED technologies. By making use of this advantage, we develop multifunctional displays which can be simultaneously used as touch screen, fingerprint sensor, ambient light sensor, and image sensor without integrating any additional sensors. We show the potential of perovskite LEDs as next-generation LED technology from environmental, economic, and technical perspectives, providing insights relevant to its future development.

About the Speaker:

Feng Gao is a full professor and head of the Optoelectronics Unit at Linköping University in Sweden since 2020. He has been appointed as a Wallenberg Scholar since 2024. His group focuses on emerging semiconductors for next-generation optoelectronic devices. He obtained his Ph.D. degree (2011) from the University of Cambridge, M.S. (2007) and B.S. (2004) degrees from Nanjing University. He received from the European Research Council (ERC) an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021) and an ERC Starting Grant (2016). He became a Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) Future Research Leader in 2019 and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow in 2017. He received the Tage Erlander Prize in Physics (2020) and the Göran Gustafsson Prize in Physics (2025), both awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.