PhD position: Printing recombination junctions in perovskite tandem solar cells

Work Activities
Recombination junctions are required for tandem and multijunction solar cells in order to short together the positive contact from one sub-cell to the negative contact of the adjacent sub-cell. This layer ideally would not introduce any electrical loss, while also providing transmission to the longer wavelength photons (for the bottom sub-cell) and diffuse reflectance for the shorter wavelength photons (for the top sub-cell). It should not absorb any light. In some cases it is also very helpful for the recombination junction to act also as a diffusion barrier, for example to relax the constraints with solvent orthogonality in subsequent layers or to prevent migration of ions from one sub-cell to the other (or from one contact layer to the other).

The primary aims for this project are to determine to which extent printing and patterning can be useful for recombination junctions in halide perovskite tandem and multi-junction solar cells. One major question is if two sub-cells can be laminated onto each other with a printed recombination junction in between, in a process analogous to wafer bonding used in Si/III-V multijunction or inverted metamorphic multijunction solar cells. This would allow for independent processing of the individual sub-cells, eliminating solvent orthogonality constraints and might also enable recombination junctions that could be made on high temperature substrates and then printed onto the cell (e.g. poly-Si recombination junctions). Another question is if a low density of printed nanoparticles can provide an effective recombination junction (electrically), since this configuration can dramatically reduce absorption while the pattern itself also provides the possibility for tunable spectral splitting. Finally, new materials for recombination junctions will be explored.

Three research goals:

1. Demonstrate lamination of two separately processed sub-cells into a functioning tandem.
2. Demonstrate printing of a recombination junction onto the top contact layer of the bottom sub-cell and subsequent top cell processing to make a functioning tandem
3. Test new recombination junction materials for halide perovskite tandems. These could include for example Cu, Ni, SnO2 or CuxS nanoparticles, or highly doped poly-Si thin films.

Embedding

The project is part of a large national initiative, SolarLab, aimed at coordinating all academic solar research in the Netherlands and supporting the Dutch solar photovoltaic industry. For more information, visit solarlab-nl.org.

You will join 40 other PhD students from across the Netherlands to tackle fundamental research challenges that underpin industrial activities in solar. This team of PhD students will participate in workshops together and closely collaborate with industrial and applied research partners to ensure that research outcomes are swiftly implemented in the solar PV industry.

Qualifications
We invite applications from highly motivated candidates with a strong background in physics, chemistry, materials science, or engineering, and a keen interest in solar cells. We especially encourage individuals from underrepresented groups to apply. Prospective PhD candidates must hold an MSc degree in a natural science or engineering discipline or equivalent qualification.

Work environment
The Nanoscale Solar Cells Group synthesizes advanced metal and semiconducting nanostructures, characterizes their material properties and integrates them into novel device structures with the aim of improving our fundamental understanding of light absorption, charge separation, recombination and transport at the nanometer scale.

We have 2 main focus areas: improving halide perovskite solar cells and using light to drive and monitor chemical reactions. We value diversity in every sense: research background, ethnicity, gender, nationality, orientation, age and beliefs and see developing talent from underrepresented groups as an essential part of or mission.

We offer a highly collaborative and supportive environment, fostering strong connections both within the group and with our national and international partners. PhD students benefit from a variety of courses designed to enhance their research skills.

AMOLF is a part of NWO-I and initiates and performs leading fundamental research on the physics of complex forms of matter, and to create new functional materials, in partnership with academia and industry. The institute is located at Amsterdam Science Park and currently employs about 140 researchers and 80 support employees. www.amolf.nl

Working conditions

• The working atmosphere at the institute is largely determined by young, enthusiastic, mostly foreign employees. Communication is informal and runs through short lines of communication.
• The position is intended as full-time (40 hours / week, 12 months / year) appointment in the service of the Netherlands Foundation of Scientific Research Institutes (NWO-I) for the duration of four years
• The starting salary is 2.781 Euro’s gross per month and a range of employment benefits.
• After successful completion of the PhD research a PhD degree will be granted at the University of Amsterdam.
• Several courses are offered, specially developed for PhD-students.
• AMOLF assists any new foreign PhD-student with housing and visa applications and compensates their transport costs and furnishing expenses.

More information?
For further information about the position, please contact Erik Garnett: e.garnett@amolf.nl

Application
You can respond to this vacancy online via the button below.

Online screening may be part of the selection.

Diversity code
AMOLF is highly committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment: we want to develop talent and creativity by bringing together people from different backgrounds and cultures. We recruit and select on the basis of competencies and talents. We strongly encourage anyone with the right qualifications to apply for the vacancy, regardless of age, gender, origin, sexual orientation or physical ability.

AMOLF has won the NNV Diversity Award 2022, which is awarded every two years by the Netherlands Physical Society for demonstrating the most successful implementation of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI).

Commercial activities in response to this ad are not appreciated.

PhD position: Printing recombination junctions in perovskite tandem solar cells

Work Activities
Recombination junctions are required for tandem and multijunction solar cells in order to short together the positive contact from one sub-cell to the negative contact of the adjacent sub-cell. This layer ideally would not introduce any electrical loss, while also providing transmission to the longer wavelength photons (for the bottom sub-cell) and diffuse reflectance for the shorter wavelength photons (for the top sub-cell). It should not absorb any light. In some cases it is also very helpful for the recombination junction to act also as a diffusion barrier, for example to relax the constraints with solvent orthogonality in subsequent layers or to prevent migration of ions from one sub-cell to the other (or from one contact layer to the other).

The primary aims for this project are to determine to which extent printing and patterning can be useful for recombination junctions in halide perovskite tandem and multi-junction solar cells. One major question is if two sub-cells can be laminated onto each other with a printed recombination junction in between, in a process analogous to wafer bonding used in Si/III-V multijunction or inverted metamorphic multijunction solar cells. This would allow for independent processing of the individual sub-cells, eliminating solvent orthogonality constraints and might also enable recombination junctions that could be made on high temperature substrates and then printed onto the cell (e.g. poly-Si recombination junctions). Another question is if a low density of printed nanoparticles can provide an effective recombination junction (electrically), since this configuration can dramatically reduce absorption while the pattern itself also provides the possibility for tunable spectral splitting. Finally, new materials for recombination junctions will be explored.

Three research goals:

1. Demonstrate lamination of two separately processed sub-cells into a functioning tandem.
2. Demonstrate printing of a recombination junction onto the top contact layer of the bottom sub-cell and subsequent top cell processing to make a functioning tandem
3. Test new recombination junction materials for halide perovskite tandems. These could include for example Cu, Ni, SnO2 or CuxS nanoparticles, or highly doped poly-Si thin films.

Embedding

The project is part of a large national initiative, SolarLab, aimed at coordinating all academic solar research in the Netherlands and supporting the Dutch solar photovoltaic industry. For more information, visit solarlab-nl.org.

You will join 40 other PhD students from across the Netherlands to tackle fundamental research challenges that underpin industrial activities in solar. This team of PhD students will participate in workshops together and closely collaborate with industrial and applied research partners to ensure that research outcomes are swiftly implemented in the solar PV industry.

Qualifications
We invite applications from highly motivated candidates with a strong background in physics, chemistry, materials science, or engineering, and a keen interest in solar cells. We especially encourage individuals from underrepresented groups to apply. Prospective PhD candidates must hold an MSc degree in a natural science or engineering discipline or equivalent qualification.

Work environment
The Nanoscale Solar Cells Group synthesizes advanced metal and semiconducting nanostructures, characterizes their material properties and integrates them into novel device structures with the aim of improving our fundamental understanding of light absorption, charge separation, recombination and transport at the nanometer scale.

We have 2 main focus areas: improving halide perovskite solar cells and using light to drive and monitor chemical reactions. We value diversity in every sense: research background, ethnicity, gender, nationality, orientation, age and beliefs and see developing talent from underrepresented groups as an essential part of or mission.

We offer a highly collaborative and supportive environment, fostering strong connections both within the group and with our national and international partners. PhD students benefit from a variety of courses designed to enhance their research skills.

AMOLF is a part of NWO-I and initiates and performs leading fundamental research on the physics of complex forms of matter, and to create new functional materials, in partnership with academia and industry. The institute is located at Amsterdam Science Park and currently employs about 140 researchers and 80 support employees. www.amolf.nl

Working conditions

• The working atmosphere at the institute is largely determined by young, enthusiastic, mostly foreign employees. Communication is informal and runs through short lines of communication.
• The position is intended as full-time (40 hours / week, 12 months / year) appointment in the service of the Netherlands Foundation of Scientific Research Institutes (NWO-I) for the duration of four years
• The starting salary is 2.781 Euro’s gross per month and a range of employment benefits.
• After successful completion of the PhD research a PhD degree will be granted at the University of Amsterdam.
• Several courses are offered, specially developed for PhD-students.
• AMOLF assists any new foreign PhD-student with housing and visa applications and compensates their transport costs and furnishing expenses.

More information?
For further information about the position, please contact Erik Garnett: e.garnett@amolf.nl

Application
You can respond to this vacancy online via the button below.

Online screening may be part of the selection.

Diversity code
AMOLF is highly committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment: we want to develop talent and creativity by bringing together people from different backgrounds and cultures. We recruit and select on the basis of competencies and talents. We strongly encourage anyone with the right qualifications to apply for the vacancy, regardless of age, gender, origin, sexual orientation or physical ability.

AMOLF has won the NNV Diversity Award 2022, which is awarded every two years by the Netherlands Physical Society for demonstrating the most successful implementation of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI).

Commercial activities in response to this ad are not appreciated.

Postdoc in biophysics: Single-cell Tracking in Organoids.

Work Activities
Summary – In this project, you will use advanced 3D imaging and AI-driven cell tracking to reveal the remarkable self-organization of cells within intestinal organoids. Using a biophysics approach, you will study how stem cells move, grow, divide, and differentiate into specific functional cell types, and hence reveal how functional miniature organs are formed. Specifically, you will for the first time reveal how this spatio-temporal program is affected by key molecular signals from the immune system. You will work in a vibrant and supportive team of PhD students and postdocs with physics and biology backgrounds within the Tans and van Zon labs in the AMOLF institute in Amsterdam, and collaborate with leading groups in organoid biology.

Questions – According to the textbooks, organs like the intestine continuously regenerate new functional cells from stem cells. However, current methods like antibody staining and RNA sequencing are ill suited to address the inherent underlying spatio-temporal dynamics. These dynamics are arguably even more important to understand the interplay with immune signals, which are thought to affect the organ regeneration process. They are in turn central to the major and growing societal challenge of chronic inflammatory diseases such as intestinal bowel disease and Crohn’s disease. Many fascinating fundamental questions of broad relevance are therefore unresolved: Do signals like interleukins increase the stem cell pool or stimulate differentiation rates to boost renewal? Do they target specific cell types, or impact movement or position of cells? Do they cause cells within the intestine to signal to each other? Given the novelty of the AI-driven cell tracking approach, you will have a unique chance to address such questions first. In addition, the organoid field is currently undergoing a massive expansion yet generally lacks the physics-inspired dynamic methodology that you will help advance.

Approach – Central to the approach is 3D imaging with advanced confocal microscopy, and AI-driven cell tracking, but also organoid growth protocols, antibody staining, and genetic engineering of fluorescent markers, which you will do in collaboration with other PhD students and technical staff. This approach allows you to follow each cell, and hence analyze diverse features including lineage relations between cells of different type or within a specific spatial region, and how they correlate with the expression of key differentiation markers – and how these features are affected by molecular signals that are normally emitted by immune cells but that you add in controlled manner. These advances will allow you to push the boundaries of AI-enabled analysis of single-cell dynamics, which will be more generally relevant both to fundamental science and applications. This first has great potential to reveal a host of unexpected phenomena. More generally, you will develop new experimental schemes, perform cutting-edge experiments, analyze the complex spatio-temporal data, come up with new mechanistic models, and describe your findings in high-level scientific papers.

Our group - We form a lively and close-knit research group of about 10 PhD students and postdocs, which work together in small teams on various projects in a highly supportive and social atmosphere that extends to the other research groups at the AMOLF institute, which is housed in a modern building in the east of Amsterdam.

Qualifications
We are looking for outstanding experimental physicists, chemists, or biologists with demonstratable interest in quantitative biophysics questions, experience in programming and/or machine learning, handling of complex data, and who thrives in a diverse, collaborative, and supportive environment. Excellent verbal and written English skills are essential.

Work environment
AMOLF is a part of NWO-I and initiate and performs leading fundamental research on the physics of complex forms of matter, and to create new functional materials, in partnership with academia and industry. The institute is located at Amsterdam Science Park and currently employs about 140 researchers and 80 support employees. www.amolf.nl

Our group - We form a lively and close-knit research group of about 10 PhD students and postdocs, which work together in small teams on various projects in a highly supportive and social atmosphere that extends to the other research groups at the AMOLF institute, which is housed in a modern building in the east of Amsterdam.

Tans group: https://www.sandertanslab.nl

Van Zon group: https://amolf.nl/research-groups/quantitative-developmental-biology

Working conditions

• The working atmosphere at the institute is largely determined by young, enthusiastic, mostly foreign employees. Communication is informal and runs through short lines of communication.
• The position is intended as full-time (40 hours / week, 12 months / year) appointment in the service of the Netherlands Foundation of Scientific Research Institutes (NWO-I) for the duration of 2 years, with a salary in scale 10 (CAO-OI) which starts at 3170 Euro's gross per month, and a range of employment benefits. AMOLF assists any new foreign Postdoc with housing and visa applications and compensates their transport costs and furnishing expenses.
• Funding is available to attend regularly international conferences.
• AMOLF assists any new foreign researcher with housing and visa applications and compensates their transport costs and furnishing expenses.

More information?
For further information about the position, please contact

Prof. dr. ir. Sander Tans

tans AT amolf.nl

Dr. Jeroen van Zon

J.v.Zon AT amolf.nl

Application
You can respond to this vacancy online via the button below.

Please annex your:

• Resume;
• Motivation on why you want to join the group (max. 1 page).

It is important to us to know why you want to join our team. Hence, we will only consider your application if it contains your motivation letter.

Applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis and as soon as an excellent match is made, the position will be filled.

Online screening may be part of the selection.

Diversity code
AMOLF is highly committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment: we want to develop talent and creativity by bringing together people from different backgrounds and cultures. We recruit and select on the basis of competencies and talents. We strongly encourage anyone with the right qualifications to apply for the vacancy, regardless of age, gender, origin, sexual orientation or physical ability.

AMOLF has won the NNV Diversity Award 2022, which is awarded every two years by the Netherlands Physical Society for demonstrating the most successful implementation of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI).

Commercial activities in response to this ad are not appreciated.

Postdoc in biophysics: Single-cell Tracking in Organoids.

Work Activities
Summary – In this project, you will use advanced 3D imaging and AI-driven cell tracking to reveal the remarkable self-organization of cells within intestinal organoids. Using a biophysics approach, you will study how stem cells move, grow, divide, and differentiate into specific functional cell types, and hence reveal how functional miniature organs are formed. Specifically, you will for the first time reveal how this spatio-temporal program is affected by key molecular signals from the immune system. You will work in a vibrant and supportive team of PhD students and postdocs with physics and biology backgrounds within the Tans and van Zon labs in the AMOLF institute in Amsterdam, and collaborate with leading groups in organoid biology.

Questions – According to the textbooks, organs like the intestine continuously regenerate new functional cells from stem cells. However, current methods like antibody staining and RNA sequencing are ill suited to address the inherent underlying spatio-temporal dynamics. These dynamics are arguably even more important to understand the interplay with immune signals, which are thought to affect the organ regeneration process. They are in turn central to the major and growing societal challenge of chronic inflammatory diseases such as intestinal bowel disease and Crohn’s disease. Many fascinating fundamental questions of broad relevance are therefore unresolved: Do signals like interleukins increase the stem cell pool or stimulate differentiation rates to boost renewal? Do they target specific cell types, or impact movement or position of cells? Do they cause cells within the intestine to signal to each other? Given the novelty of the AI-driven cell tracking approach, you will have a unique chance to address such questions first. In addition, the organoid field is currently undergoing a massive expansion yet generally lacks the physics-inspired dynamic methodology that you will help advance.

Approach – Central to the approach is 3D imaging with advanced confocal microscopy, and AI-driven cell tracking, but also organoid growth protocols, antibody staining, and genetic engineering of fluorescent markers, which you will do in collaboration with other PhD students and technical staff. This approach allows you to follow each cell, and hence analyze diverse features including lineage relations between cells of different type or within a specific spatial region, and how they correlate with the expression of key differentiation markers – and how these features are affected by molecular signals that are normally emitted by immune cells but that you add in controlled manner. These advances will allow you to push the boundaries of AI-enabled analysis of single-cell dynamics, which will be more generally relevant both to fundamental science and applications. This first has great potential to reveal a host of unexpected phenomena. More generally, you will develop new experimental schemes, perform cutting-edge experiments, analyze the complex spatio-temporal data, come up with new mechanistic models, and describe your findings in high-level scientific papers.

Our group - We form a lively and close-knit research group of about 10 PhD students and postdocs, which work together in small teams on various projects in a highly supportive and social atmosphere that extends to the other research groups at the AMOLF institute, which is housed in a modern building in the east of Amsterdam.

Qualifications
We are looking for outstanding experimental physicists, chemists, or biologists with demonstratable interest in quantitative biophysics questions, experience in programming and/or machine learning, handling of complex data, and who thrives in a diverse, collaborative, and supportive environment. Excellent verbal and written English skills are essential.

Work environment
AMOLF is a part of NWO-I and initiate and performs leading fundamental research on the physics of complex forms of matter, and to create new functional materials, in partnership with academia and industry. The institute is located at Amsterdam Science Park and currently employs about 140 researchers and 80 support employees. www.amolf.nl

Our group - We form a lively and close-knit research group of about 10 PhD students and postdocs, which work together in small teams on various projects in a highly supportive and social atmosphere that extends to the other research groups at the AMOLF institute, which is housed in a modern building in the east of Amsterdam.

Tans group: https://www.sandertanslab.nl

Van Zon group: https://amolf.nl/research-groups/quantitative-developmental-biology

Working conditions

• The working atmosphere at the institute is largely determined by young, enthusiastic, mostly foreign employees. Communication is informal and runs through short lines of communication.
• The position is intended as full-time (40 hours / week, 12 months / year) appointment in the service of the Netherlands Foundation of Scientific Research Institutes (NWO-I) for the duration of 2 years, with a salary in scale 10 (CAO-OI) which starts at 3170 Euro's gross per month, and a range of employment benefits. AMOLF assists any new foreign Postdoc with housing and visa applications and compensates their transport costs and furnishing expenses.
• Funding is available to attend regularly international conferences.
• AMOLF assists any new foreign researcher with housing and visa applications and compensates their transport costs and furnishing expenses.

More information?
For further information about the position, please contact

Prof. dr. ir. Sander Tans

tans AT amolf.nl

Dr. Jeroen van Zon

J.v.Zon AT amolf.nl

Application
You can respond to this vacancy online via the button below.

Please annex your:

• Resume;
• Motivation on why you want to join the group (max. 1 page).

It is important to us to know why you want to join our team. Hence, we will only consider your application if it contains your motivation letter.

Applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis and as soon as an excellent match is made, the position will be filled.

Online screening may be part of the selection.

Diversity code
AMOLF is highly committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment: we want to develop talent and creativity by bringing together people from different backgrounds and cultures. We recruit and select on the basis of competencies and talents. We strongly encourage anyone with the right qualifications to apply for the vacancy, regardless of age, gender, origin, sexual orientation or physical ability.

AMOLF has won the NNV Diversity Award 2022, which is awarded every two years by the Netherlands Physical Society for demonstrating the most successful implementation of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI).

Commercial activities in response to this ad are not appreciated.

Medewerker HR

Work Activities
Als HR medewerker verzorg je administratieve processen rond werving en selectie en neem je deel aan selectiegesprekken. Ook informeer je buitenlandse medewerkers over hun verplichtingen na aankomst in Nederland en assisteer je hen daarbij, zoals bijvoorbeeld de aanvraag van hun verblijfsdocument en zorgverzekering. Tevens informeer je medewerkers over secundaire arbeidsvoorwaarden en handel je aanvragen en declaraties daarvan af. Soms maak je (op verzoek) overzichten voor het management en signaleert daarin bijzonderheden. Bij al je werkzaamheden kan je eventuele knelpunten signaleren en verbetervoorstellen doen. In deze functie heb je grote vrijheid in het organiseren van je werkzaamheden en heb je veel ruimte voor initiatief.

Qualifications
De ideale kandidaat voor deze functie heeft:

• HBO werk- en denkniveau;
• Opleiding / Ervaring binnen HR;
• Goede beheersing van de Nederlandse en Engelse taal;
• Kennis van en inzicht in bedrijfsmatige processen rond HR;
• Accuratesse en flexibiliteit;
• Verantwoordelijkheidsgevoel, teamgeest en organisatietalent.

Work environment
De afdeling ondersteunt twee onderzoeksorganisaties; AMOLF en ARCNL. Bij deze organisaties op het Amsterdam Science Park werken in totaal circa 240 onderzoekers en 80 ondersteunende medewerkers. AMOLF initieert en verricht toonaangevend fundamenteel onderzoek aan nieuwe, strategisch belangrijke complexe molecuul- en materiaalsystemen, in samenwerking met de Nederlandse universiteiten en industrie. Zie ook www.amolf.nl.

Het Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography (ARCNL) verricht fundamenteel onderzoek aan de fysica en technologie van nano-lithografie, in het bijzonder voor toepassing in de halfgeleiderindustrie. Het ARCNL is een publiek-private samenwerking tussen ASML en meerdere kennisinstellingen. Zie ook www.arcnl.nl.

De afdeling HR ondersteunt leidinggevenden en medewerkers bij alle HR-aangelegenheden. Doordat bijna alle wetenschappers een tijdelijke arbeidsovereenkomst hebben, en de helft van hen uit het buitenland komt, besteedt de afdeling veel tijd aan de instroom - en het informeren - van nieuwe medewerkers.

Working conditions

• De werksfeer op het instituut wordt in hoge mate bepaald door jonge, enthousiaste, veelal buitenlandse medewerkers. De communicatie is informeel en verloopt via korte lijnen.
• Het betreft een dienstverband voor 32 - 40 uren per week van twee jaar met de intentie om aansluitend een vast dienstverband aan te bieden.
• Inschaling vindt plaats in schaal 8 of 9, minimaal € 3.294,00 en maximaal € 4.993,00 bruto per maand (afhankelijk van je opleiding en ervaring), te vermeerderen met het vakantiegeld (8%) en een eindejaarsuitkering (8,33%).
• Onze uitstekende secundaire arbeidsvoorwaarden zijn hier te raadplegen. Training on the job en studiefaciliteiten zijn vanzelfsprekend.
• Voor aanstelling in deze functie is een ‘Verklaring Omtrent het Gedrag’ vereist. De aanvraagkosten worden door AMOLF vergoed.

More information?
Voor meer informatie over de functie, kun je contact opnemen met Saskia Kemner, Hoofd HR: s.kemner@amolf.nl of 020-754 7410.

Application
Heb je interesse in deze functie, dan kan je vóór 31 december 2024 solliciteren via onderstaande knop.

Diversity code
AMOLF and ARCNL are highly committed to an inclusive and diverse work environment: we want to develop talent and creativity by bringing together people from different backgrounds and cultures. We recruit and select on the basis of competencies and talents. We strongly encourage anyone with the right qualifications to apply for the vacancy, regardless of age, gender, origin, sexual orientation or physical ability.

Commercial activities in response to this ad are not appreciated.