ENI Renewable Energy Prize 2012 for Albert Polman and Harry Atwater

Light management
Polman and Atwater's research addresses the two key problems in photovoltaic technology: 1) conventional solar cells do not convert all light from the sun into electricity, and 2) solar cells are relatively expensive to manufacture because of high materials costs. These problems can be partly solved by better control over the capturing and absorption of sunlight in the solar cell. Polman and Atwater call this "light management", a term that is now used worldwide in solar cell research. They demonstrated that by integrating precisely designed metallic or dielectric nanostructures into the solar cell, the different colors of light from the sun are more efficiently absorbed and more efficiently converted into electricity. Their designs also enable the thickness of solar cells to be strongly reduced, so that they can be manufactured at much lower costs. This is particularly interesting for solar cells based on materials that are scarce in the earth's crust. The nano-solar cell technology introduced by Polman and Atwater is scalable to large volumes.

The ENI Award
The ENI Award was established in July 2007 by the Italian energy company ENI to stimulate the development of innovative ideas for a better use of energy sources, promote environmental research and to stimulate new generations of researchers. The yearly ENI Award has four distinct prizes: New Frontiers of Hydrocarbons; Renewable and Non-conventional Energy; Protection of the Environment; and Debut in Research. The jury is composed of renowned researchers in the area of energy and the environment, including Nobel prize winners. They award the prize to the best research and the best researchers in the field of energy worldwide. According to ENI the ambition of the ENI awards is become a Nobel Prize for Energy .

Albert Polman
Albert Polman is one of the pioneers of nanophotonics, the research field that concerns the control of light at extremely small length scales. He has been working on applying nanophotonic concepts in photovoltaics since 2006. Polman is program director of the FOM program Nanophotovoltaics and the FOM focus group Light management in new photovoltaic materials. Hij is member of the program committee of the FOM Joint solar program and the FOM Young energy scientists program. Polman is research group leader at the FOM-institute AMOLF in the Science Park Amsterdam; since 2006 he is also director of the institute. Polman is associated with the University of Amsterdam as professor of Photonic materials for photovoltaics.

Harry A. Atwater
Harry Atwater is also a pioneer of nanophotonics and has been active in photovoltaics research for over twenty years. Atwater is professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, Pasadena, CA) and is director of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center on Light-Matter Interactions in Solar Energy Conversion and director of the Resnick Institute for Science, Energy and Sustainability, Caltech's largest endowed research program focused on energy. Atwater also established two companies in solar cell technology.
Polman and Atwater have a long-standing collaboration. Members of their research groups frequently travel between Amsterdam and California. Aside from many papers on nanostructured solar cell designs, they published key review and commentary papers in Nature Materials (2010, 2012). Polman is affiliated with Caltech as a visiting scientist; Atwater is a visiting scientist at AMOLF.

Contact
Prof.dr. Albert Polman, +31 (0)20 754 7100

References
Photonic design principles for ultrahigh-efficiency photovoltaics
A. Polman and H.A. Atwater, Nature Mater. 11, 174 (2012)
Plasmonics for improved photovoltaic devices
H.A. Atwater and A. Polman, Nature Materials 9, 205 (2010)