[William Mong Distinguished Lecture 2024 - 2025] Professor Feng GAO (May 20, 2025)

[William Mong Distinguished Lecture 2024 -2025] Sustainable Development of Next-Generation Solar Cells and LEDs

Date: May 20, 2025 (Tuesday)
Time: 4:00pm (with light refreshment at 3:30pm)
Venue: Lecture Theatre A, G/F, Chow Yei Ching Building (CB-A)
Speaker: Professor Feng Gao, Linkoping University, Sweden

Abstract
Solar cells and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are essential components for a sustainable future. By focusing on emerging perovskite semiconductors, we demonstrate how sustainability is integrated into the development of next-generation perovskite-based solar cells and LEDs. For perovskite solar cells, we have developed a low-cost, green solvent-based holistic recycling strategy to recover all valuable components from perovskite photovoltaic waste. After repeated degradation-recycling processes, the recycled devices exhibit similar efficiency and stability compared to fresh devices. We highlight the unique opportunities of perovskite photovoltaics for holistic recycling and paves the way for a sustainable perovskite solar economy. Perovskite LEDs possess a unique feature -- they can efficiently detect light, enabling the development of new applications that are challenging for other LED technologies. Leveraging this advantage, we have created multifunctional displays that can simultaneously function as touch screens, fingerprint sensors, ambient light sensors, and image sensors without the need for additional sensors. We demonstrate the potential of perovskite LEDs as next-generation LED technology from environmental, economic, and technical perspectives, providing insights relevant to their future development.

About the speaker:
Professor Feng Gao is a full professor and head of the Optoelectronics Unit at Linköping University in Sweden since 2020. He has been appointed as a Wallenberg Scholar since 2024. His group focuses on emerging semiconductors for next-generation optoelectronic devices. He obtained his Ph.D. degree (2011) from the University of Cambridge, M.S. (2007) and B.S. (2004) degrees from Nanjing University. He received from the European Research Council (ERC) an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021) and an ERC Starting Grant (2016). He became a Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) Future Research Leader in 2019 and a Wallenberg Academy Fellow in 2017. He received the Tage Erlander Prize in Physics (2020) and the Göran Gustafsson Prize in Physics (2025), both awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.