Solar cells, van der Waals heterostructures, electrocatalysis and static charging are studied by widely differing communities. However, when you look even a little deeper into each, it becomes clear that the same phenomena keep cropping up again and again: e.g. Fermi level alignment, surface state trapping, charge screening. The shared underlying physics suggests that there should be much to learn by developing a general framework into which all these, superficially unrelated, phenomena can be placed. This course will provide you with this framework. To do so we will ask two simple questions of any interface: what determines the equilibrium charge distribution across it and how fast is that equilibrium actually reached? Whether the answer is femtoseconds or years turns out to explain why some of these phenomena are highly predictable while others have resisted explanation for centuries.
- verantwortliche Lehrperson: Richard Kramer Campen