A PhD Studentship (to start in October 2022) is now available via the HETSYS Centre for Doctoral Training at Warwick Uni – and it’s all about improving on the current technologies to manufacture electronics and photovoltaics, with the help of molecular simulations.

As you might know, copper and silver are key to electronics and photovoltaics. However, depositing in a controlled manner these metals on a given surface is a slow and costly process. This project seeks to unravel the molecular details of a transformative technology, developed by Prof. Ross Hatton (Warwick Chemistry, who is going to co-supervise this studentship), that relies on thin layers of specific organofluorine compounds to achieve the selective deposition of metals. This unconventional approach is fast and inexpensive, but our understanding of its microscopic mechanism is presently very limited.

By combining density functional theory and classical molecular dynamics, we will investigate the interplay between the metal-organofluorine interaction strength and the polymer-polymer intermolecular interactions  – thus identifying concrete design rules to further electronics and photovoltaics. Some more details can be found here, but please do get in touch if you’d like to hear more!

Securing a spot in the HetSys cohort is a rather competitive business, so be smart about it and make your move sooner rather than later 😉