Sustainable Energy Materials
AMOLF initiates and conducts fundamental research that leads to valuable insights and opportunities to create new functional materials and to find solutions to societal challenges. This translates into a research program that focuses on three highly interdisciplinary themes. One of these themes is Sustainable Energy Materials.
Enabling the energy transition
Climate change is the greatest challenge facing society in the coming decades. A future sustainable society must convert sunlight much more efficiently to electricity and chemicals. This conversion requires exquisite control over both light and matter at nanometer length scales and ultrafast time scales.
Sustainable Energy Materials
Our research program uses fundamental insights in (nano)photonics and (nano)materials to efficiently convert sunlight to electricity and chemicals. We develop new material properties and device functionalities, ranging from self-optimizing tandem solar cells to programmable designs for light-driven chemical reactors.
Our research questions
We explore how manipulating light, charge, and ions in space and time leads to new ways to convert energy. Ultimately, this will result in higher efficiency, better stability, and new functionality in solar cells, light-emitting diodes, and sustainable chemistry .
Collaborative spirit
The Sustainable Energy Materials department is organized as a team of teams to stimulate collaboration. Our team is highly international, interdisciplinary and diverse (also see our diversity policy). NWO has recognized our efforts toward a more diverse and collaborative team with the Diversity Award (2022) and Team Science Award (2023). We are always looking for outstanding students from all different backgrounds to bring their unique perspectives and talents.
Please find the open positions here.
Related national programs
Our department also coordinates the national solar energy program SolarNL and the related academic program SolarLab.
More information
Do you have questions about the Sustainable Energy Materials research program? Then please contact program manager Tom Veeken (email: t.veeken@amolf.nl).
