Photocathodes are at the heart of 4th Generation Light Sources and engineering their properties to suit particular applications is a major part of ASTeC research.
Recognising the huge advances in computational chemistry over the past decade, the department is collaborating with Prof. Nicholas Harrison’s group at Imperial College and STFC Scientific Computing to better understand photocathodes and develop material modifications to improve their performance.
ASTeC are funding a PhD studentship at Imperial College to work on this project. The collaboration kicked off with a meeting at Daresbury on October 21st attended by representatives of the collaborators and the new Ph.D. student Bruno Camino.
The meeting was an opportunity to share information on cathode research programmes at Daresbury with computational chemistry colleagues who, in turn told us about theoretical methods they use for studying excited states of materials and the photoemission process.
Bruno Camino presented work he undertook at Turin University, where he gained his Master’s degree prior to taking up the PhD position at Imperial earlier this month. This work (also in computational chemistry of technologically important materials) involved photoexcitation of dye-sensitized solar cells (Bachelor’s degree) and photothermocatalytic hydrogen production using ZnS (Master’s degree).
