Friday!

The talks I attended on Friday were much more theoretical than those I had seen in previous days. Some of the highlights were:

David Gundlach's presentation, entitled Why Contacts Matter, was a discussion on the difficulty of separating contact effects from material properties in charge transport studies. The main point was to show how analysis of a device can be obscured by the voltage drop at the contacts.



Alessandro Morgera, from the Italian synchrotron facility in Trieste (yes, they have a synchrotron in Trieste!) showed how he had used a model system of 4-hydroxycyanobenzene (4HCB) single crystals to perform Electronic Anisotropic Transport studies with an IR-based setup in the synchrotron.



Dave Herman's talk, entitled Nanoscale Co-assembly of Zinc Oxide and Conjugated Organic Molecules in Oriented Macroscopic Films via Electrodeposition, discussed ways in which we can play with the orientation of hybrid lamellar structures inside bulk heterojunctions. The main goal of his work is to induce interdigitation on 10 nm length-scales, in order to optimize exciton diffusion and charge splitting/diffusion.