Tiburtius Prize for Eike Köhnen
Eike Köhnen (center) was awarded with the Tiburtius Prize for his outstanding dissertation on tandem solar cells with perovskites. In the team of Prof. Steve Albrecht (left, TU Berlin and HZB) he was involved in several world records. Prof. Michael Lehmann (TU Berlin) gave the laudatory speech.
On Tuesday, 6 December 2022, Dr. Eike Köhnen received the Tiburtius Prize (First Place) for outstanding dissertations. Eike Köhnen has contributed to significantly increasing the efficiency of tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon, to the point of setting world records.
Eike Köhnen worked on so-called tandem solar cells, a new type of photovoltaic technology that promises significantly higher efficiencies. In Prof. Steve Albrecht's team (TU Berlin and HZB), he combined conventional silicon solar cells with a perovskite cell and analysed with state-of-the-art methods how losses can occur. These insights helped to increase the efficiency of such tandem solar cells to over 29 %. This value was an absolute world record for more than eight months.
Köhnen also obtained two patents as a PhD student. His thesis was assessed with the top mark summa cum laude. In Albrecht's team, Eike Köhnen was also active in science communication and maintained a lively Twitter account.
"The Tiburtius Prize is an outstanding recognition of this excellent dissertation and Eike's pioneering work in the development of solar cells," says Prof. Steve Albrecht, who supervised the PhD-thesis. Co-supervisor Prof. Bernd Rech, who heads the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin as scientific director, adds: "Eike Köhnen has played a major role in our internationally visible successes with tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon. I congratulate him on this fine award."
The award is named after Professor Joachim Tiburtius, who was Senator for National Education in Berlin from 1951 to 1963. The State Conference of Rectors and Presidents of Berlin Universities (LKRP) awards three prizes annually, as well as an additional three recognition prizes, to doctoral students at Berlin universities for outstanding dissertations
Title of the dissertation by Eike Köhnen: Optical and Electrical Optimization by Advanced Characterization of Monolithic Perovskite/Silicon Tandem Solar Cells.
- Accelerating through accelerator physicsWhen I applied to the International Summer Student Programme at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, I never thought that I would be diving into a whole new, and to me previously unknown, area of physics. Though I have had courses on related topics like mechanics and electromagnetism, accelerator physics also includes special relativity, optics and a whole lot of maths. All these areas of physics are combined in order to calculate, as precisely as possible, the movements of the particles inside the accelerator.
- My first time working in a gloveboxHave you ever tried doing precise work while wearing oversized rubber gloves attached to a giant glass box? Neither had I, until today. My first experience working in a glovebox turned out to be one of the most memorable parts of the experiment.
- New contact material boosts the efficiency of perovskite solar cellsA newly developed material for the electron contact improves the efficiency of single perovskite solar cells and perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells. The new material is based on a carborane molecule. It offers several advantages over the standard material C60, as shown by the study led by Steve Albrecht’s team. The new material has since been patented and is already commercially available.