A vacuum chamber for Christmas

Post date: Dec. 10, 2019 10:25:08 PM

Here I am at giving a new update on my project. It is almost Christmas and this year Santa was generous with me, in advance. I just received a new vacuum chamber to conduct my experiments (the picture is at the bottom).

Recently I realized that most of the issues I had, getting the predicted efficiency out of my hybrid devices, were caused by heat losses in my experimental setup. For this reason I designed and bought I new vacuum chamber equipped with everything I need. I am confident that this is going to be a turning point in my project.

In the mean time, within the last two months I made significant progresses in the several side project I am conducting.

After several issues I am ready to deposit and characterize the stack of materials that will form the heat mirror to be implemented in my device. This part is intended to increase the final efficiency of my hybrid device, since it will reduce radiative heat losses. The stack of materials to be deposited is already designed and I am missing just the final deposition and characterization part. I am confident that I will be able to conclude this side project soon, and to write a paper shortly.

Also the flexoelectric side project is doing pretty well. I made a huge campaign of measurements and I think that now I have enough material to work on a paper. My colleagues at MIT are enthusiastic with this idea, and they helped me a lot with the data analysis and the theoretical background. Some of our result were presented recently at MRS Fall meeting 2019 in Boston, with a talk titled "Beyond p-n Junctions—Flexoelectric Photo-Detection and Energy Harvesting in Bismuth Telluride Thin Films".

Finally, also regarding the new PV material I was working on recently, I made very important progress (a picture of one of my samples is attached to this page). In this case the characterization is finished and I already wrote a paper. Now I am collecting suggestions and revisions from my co-authors and making some final addition. I really hope I can submit this work soon. I strongly think this is a very good work and will have a good impact. Let’s see what I will get. Cross the fingers!!!