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Alexi Arango, Assistant Professor of Physics: "The entire facility is custom designed by myself
with the intent of making the fabrication process as facile as possible. The innovation
with this system is that everything is in one place. So we have three interconnected glove boxes,
and you start at one glove box, with a particular process, and then you move from glove box
to glove box in order to complete the fabrication process."
Alyssa Goncalves '11 Physics Major: "We're going to be using chloroform to dilute our quantities
of cadmium selenide quantum dots. We want to spin films of cadmium selenide and we want different
amounts of cadmium selenide on different films."
Arango: "My research focuses on third-generation solar cells. And third-generation solar cells employ new
semiconducting materials, like quantum dots, molecular dyes, metal oxides like white paint."
Kathy Aidala, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics: "Alexi's lab is well set up to make layered structures
with different materials. I'm interested in some of those fundamental properties of the, the electronic
properties of these materials that go into making solar cells."
Arango: "Our alternative semiconductors can potentially--we don't know for sure result
in dramatically higher efficiency and dramatically lower manufacturing costs."
Aidala: "You really need to know some of the details about how charges move through those materials.
So I can actually look at combinations of those materials and see, well, how easy is it for the
electron to get from one type of material to another type of material, for example.
And then that might later on affect the efficiency of the device."
Janice Hudgings, professor and chair of physics: "We can build the device, we can test it and figure
out what's wrong with it, think about how to do it better, and then build the next one.
It's great for students to be able to see that whole process, and it opens up this whole other
realm of sort of possibilities for engineering and physics questions we can ask."
Arango: "Our long-term vision is to be able to deploy a technology in innovative ways that
no one has thought of before. We're talking about printing on large fabrics--a football-field
size solar module, essentially. And then carrying that up to a skyscraper and rolling it off the edge
of the skyscraper. Like an instantaneous power plant, essentially, from solar.
But for us specifically we want to figure out how to make those individual solar cells
that make up the entire solar installation."