Past Events

Lead halide perovskites are one of the promising materials for opto-electronic devices including solar cells. The investigation into their optical properties associated with their electronic transitions, including the excitons and polaritons, have been conducted more than three decades ago [1-3]. The materials have attracted much attention in more recent years since the early reports by Miyasaka [4] and Snaith [5]. In this talk Prof. Teruya Ishihara will share with us the early research works on the optical properties of lead halide perovskites [1-3] and how they were connected to application of solar cells [6].

[1] T Ishihara, J Takahashi, T Goto, "Optical properties due to electronic transitions in two-dimensional semiconductors (CnH2n+1NH3)PbI4,"  Physical review B 42 , 11099 (1990).
[2] X Hong, T Ishihara, AV Nurmikko, "Dielectric confinement effect on excitons in PbI4-based layered semiconductors," Physical Review B 45, 6961 (1992).
[3] T Fujita, Y Sato, T Kuitani, T Ishihara, "Tunable polariton absorption of distributed feedback microcavities at room temperature," Physical Review B 57, 12428 (1998).
[4] A Kojima, K Teshima, Y Shirai, T Miyasaka, "Organometal halide perovskites as visible-light sensitizers for photovoltaic cells," Journal of the american chemical society 131, 6050-6051 (2009).
[5] MM Lee, J Teuscher, T Miyasaka, TN Murakami, HJ Snaith, "Efficient hybrid solar cells based on meso-superstructured organometal halide perovskites," Science 338, 643-647 (2012).
[6] R Yoshimoto, "Birth of Perovskite Solar Cells," a series of articles in web journal, New Switch (in Japanese),  https://newswitch.jp/p/37960

Biography 

Teruya Ishihara has pioneered the study of the optical properties of hybrid perovskites, long before the recent surge of interest in these materials for their applications in various optoelectronic devices.  He graduated from Department of Physics, the University of Tokyo in 1981 and continued to study in its graduate school. In 1984, he started working as an Assistant at Department of Physics, Tohoku University till 1993.  During the period he received PhD from Tohoku University and stayed at Brown University as a visiting researcher in 1990-1992. He was an Associate Professor at Department of Physical Electronics, Hiroshima University during 1993-2000. He was a head of Exciton Engineering Laboratory at Frontier Research System, RIKEN in 1999-2007. He came back to Tohoku University in 2003 as a full professor and retired in March, 2023. From April, 2023, he is a Visiting Professor at Department of Physics, the University of Hong Kong. His research interest has been experimental investigation on optical properties of materials with characteristic features, including layered semiconductors, semiconductors and metallic thin films with artificial sub-wavelength structures.