Solar Energy Conversion

The importance of developing new, clean and renewable sources of energy will continue to grow in the foreseeable future and so will the need for the education of researchers in this field of research. The interest and challenges of the field continue to shift from simple homogeneous solutions to increasingly more complex heterogeneous systems and interfaces. Over the past decade there have been numerous theoretical and experimental breakthroughs many of which still exist only in the primary literature. The aim of this book is to gather in one volume the description of modern, sometimes exploratory, experimental and theoretical techniques applied to the dynamics of interfacial electron and electronic excitation transfer processes studied in the context of solar energy conversion. The intended treatment will be fundamental in nature and thus applicable to a broad range of hybrid photovoltaic and photocatalytic materials and interfaces. The book will focus on the dynamic aspects of the electron injection, exciton and carrier relaxation processes, as well as coherence effects, which continue to provide the impetus and the greatest challenge for the development of new methodologies.

Piotr Piotrowiak is Professor of Physical Chemistry at Rutgers University-Newark. He graduated with a Magisterium in Chemical Physics from the University of Wroc3aw, Poland, in 1982 and a Ph.D in Physical Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1988. He held a Postdoctoral Associate position at Argonne National Laboratory in the Electron Transfer and Energy Conversion Group between 1988 to 1991 and was an Assistant Professor at the Univeristy of New Orleans from 1991 to 1996. He then went on to hold An Associate position in 1996. He has been a visiting fellow at Tokyo Metropolitan University and visiting scientist in the protein engineering department at Genentech Inc., in San Francisco. He has been an active member of many scientific committees and international conferences including the International Symposium of the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation for the Independent States of the FSU, Kiev, Ukraine, in October 2003; the International Organizing Committee for the XX IUPAC Symposium on Photochemistry, Granada, Spain, July 2004; Session Chair, Physical Chemistry of Interfaces and Nanomaterials, International SPIE Optics and Photonics Symposium, San Diego, California, July 2006; Symposium co-Chair, Physical Chemistry of Interfaces and Nanomaterials, International SPIE Optics and Photonics Symposium, San Diego, California, August 2007; Session Chair, Gordon Conference on Electronic Structure and Dynamics, Waterville, Maine, July 2009; Member of the NSF-MRI ARRA review panel for undergraduate institutions, Arlington, Virginia, November 2009; Invited speaker at the Special Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Laser, 239th ACS National Meeting, San Francisco, California, March 2010. His main research interests are the development of ultrafast microscopy methods applied to electron and excitation transfer at interfaces and in inhomogeneous systems, time-resolved laser spectroscopy of reactive intermediates, interactions between host-guest systems and redox proteins.