Marie Curie ITN SEPOMO

The Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie ITN SEPOMO network offers 15 high level fellowships at 11 different institutes and companies across Europe for joint research on efficient photovoltaic devices. The most talented and motivated students will be selected for a 3-year advanced multidisciplinary research training, preferably starting June 2017 (10 positions) and October 2017 (5 positions).

The mission of ITN SEPOMO – Spins in Efficient Photovoltaic devices based on Organic MOlecules – is to bring the performance of organic solar cells forward by taking advantage of the so far unexplored degree of freedom of photogenerated species in organic materials, their spin. This challenging idea provides a unified platform for excellent research to promote the world-wide position of Europe in the field of organic photovoltaics and electronics, and to train strongly motivated early stage researchers for a career in science and technology oriented industry that is rapidly growing.

About the research

Organic solar cells have the potential to become an environmental friendly, inexpensive, large area and flexible photovoltaics technology. Their main advantages are low process temperatures, the potential for very low cost due to abundant materials and scalable processing, and the possibility of producing flexible devices on plastic substrates. To improve their commercialization capacity, to compete with established power generation and to complement other renewable energy technologies, the performance of state-of-the-art organic solar cells needs to be further improved.

Our scientific objectives are to develop several novel routes to enhance the efficiency of organic solar cells by understanding and exploiting the electronic spin interactions. This will allow us to address crucial bottlenecks in state-of-the-art organic solar cells: we will increase the quantum efficiency by reducing the dominant recombination losses and by enhancing the light harvesting and exciton generation, e.g. by means of internal upconversion of excited states.

About the training programme

The 15 early state researchers (ESRs) will be trained within the interdisciplinary (physics, chemistry, engineering) and intersectoral (academia, R&D center, enterprise) consortium in highly relevant fundamental (8 academic partners) yet application-oriented (3 industrial partners) research with the potential to commercialise the results. The hard and soft skills learned in our network are central for the ESRs to pursue their individual careers in academics or industry.