Photoelectrochemistry of Semiconductors

Since the early 1970s, semiconductor photoelectrochemistry has been attracting considerable interest in academic--and increasingly in industrial--laboratories for solar energy conversion. This textbook introduces the principles of semiconductor photoelectrochemistry to undergraduate and master-level students, with basic physics and physical chemistry as pre-requisites. Several books exist in the domain, but none presents the field at an introductory, education-oriented level. The book, with its interdisciplinary character, demonstrates how two separately taught fields at universities--electrochemistry and solid-state physics--can be combined for the development of systems for solar energy conversion for electricity generation or preparation of chemicals. It contains detailed mathematical derivations of all related concepts, illustrating the common characteristics of these fields. Appendices are included in the chapters to present the details of several aspects of physical science in support of the fundamentals. A comprehensive bibliography is presented at the end, suggesting several textbooks and reference books complementing the topics covered in the textbook.

Anders Hagfeldt is professor of physical chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He obtained his PhD degree from Uppsala University in 1993 and was a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Michael Grätzel (1993-1994) at EPFL. His research focuses on the fields of dye-sensitized solar cells, perovskite solar cells, and solar fuels. He has published more than 510 scientific papers that have received over 60,000 citations (h index of 117). From 2014 to 2018, he was on the list of Thomson Reuter's Highly Cited Researchers. Prof. Hagfeldt is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and Doctor Honoris Causa at Paris Diderot University, France.

Nick Vlachopoulos obtained a degree in chemical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (1979), and two doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania, USA (1984), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland (1990). He worked as researcher in the group of Professor Michael Grätzel at EPFL (1986-1999). In 1988-1989 and in 2000-2014, he was employed as a researcher in France, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden in several areas of analytical and physical electrochemistry and as a research and development scientist at Ntera Ltd., Ireland, in electrochromic devices. In 2014, he returned to EPFL as a senior research scientist and lecturer in the group of Prof. Anders Hagfeldt. His activities have been mainly related to the application of electrochemistry in energy conversion, with particular emphasis on the molecular electrochemistry of chemically modified mesoscopic oxide electrodes and their application to solar energy.