Event Details

Speaker: Prof. David Scanlon, UCL. In this talk I will outline the strategies that we use in the Materials Theory Group to look beyond the current TCO materials, highlighting the interplay of theory and experiment.

Abstract: The combination of electrical conductivity and optical transparency in a single material gives transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) an important role in modern optoelectronic applications such as in solar cells, flat panel displays, and smart coatings. The most commercially successful TCO so far is tin doped indium oxide (Indium Tin Oxide – ITO), which has become the industrial standard TCO for many optoelectronics applications; the ITO market share was 93% in 2013. Its widespread use stems from the fact that lower resistivities have been achieved in ITO than in any other TCO; resistivities in ITO have reached as low as 7.2 × 10-5Ω cm, while retaining >90% visible transparency. In recent years, the demand for ITO has increased considerably, mainly due to the continuing replacement of cathode ray tube technology with flat screen displays. However, indium is quite a rare metal, having an abundance in the Earth’s crust of only 160 ppb by weight, compared with abundances for Zn and Sn of 79000 ppb and 2200 ppb respectively, and is often found in unstable geopolitical areas. The overwhelming demand for ITO has led to large fluctuations in the cost of indium over the past decade. There has thus been a drive in recent years to develop reduced-indium and indium-free materials which can replace ITO as the dominant industrial TCO. In this talk I will outline the strategies that we use in the Materials Theory Group to look beyond the current TCO materials, highlighting the interplay of theory and experiment.

Bio-sketch: Prof. David Scanlon (UCL) grew up in Sallins, Co. Kildare, Ireland. He completed his undergraduate degree in Computational Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 2006, before gaining his PhD in Chemistry also at TCD in 2011. He won the Royal Irish Academy Young Chemists Prize 2011, for “the most outstanding Irish PhD thesis of 2011 in the area of chemical sciences”. He then moved to the UK to take up a Ramsay Fellowship in the Department of Chemistry in UCL, where he has been ever since. He was appointed as a Lecturer in 2013, promoted to Reader (Associate Professor in the American naming convention) in 2016 and to Professor of Computational Materials Design in 2018. He was awarded the 2015 RSC Harrison-Meldola Memorial Prize for the “development and application of computational techniques to understanding and predicting the properties of functional semi-conductors for energy applications” and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He 2018, he was awarded the UCL Student Union Student Choice Award for “Outstanding Research Supervision”, Following this he was shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Awards 2018 for “Outstanding Research Supervisor of the Year”. In 2021, he was awarded the RSC Materials Chemistry Division Early Career Award for his “contributions to materials modelling of conducting oxides”

Professor Scanlon’s main research interests are in computationally-driven materials design and characterisation (see website for more details). His work is at the forefront of the global effort to explore new materials based on computations and to advance the capacity of first-principles calculations to predict materials properties. He has published over 240 articles with over 14800 citations, earning an H-index of 67 (Google Scholar). He is a Scientific Editor for Materials Horizons, and sits on the advisory boards of the Journal of Materials Chemistry C, Materials Advances, ACS Applied Energy Materials, Cell Reports: Physical Science, Matter and PRX Energy. He is an ERC Starting Grant holder (2018-2023), his research has been funded by the EPSRC, the Faraday Institution (FI), and Innovate UK and he has raised over £11 million in funding since 2016. DOS has graduated 7 PhD students, and he currently leads a research team of 6 PDRA, 14 PhD students and 11 Masters students. DOS is a co-I on the FI NEXGENNA and FutureCat Phase 2 projects, and is the lead academic for the FI’s dedicated supercomputer MICHAEL which is hosted at UCL.

Research/Practice Theme: Theory & Computation.

Interdisciplinary invitations: Physics, Engineering, MSI & Computational mailing list.

Link to MS teams meeting: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3Ameeting_ZGIwYjMwZDUtMDhlZS00MjQxLTk4OTEtMDM3MmU1YmJlMDhm%40thread.v2/0?context=%7B%22Tid%22%3A%229c9bcd11-977a-4e9c-a9a0-bc734090164a%22%2C%22Oid%22%3A%228e8d1d45-3d03-4da8-b7ef-8a97436d46a7%22%2C%22MessageId%22%3A%220%22%7D