Oxford/Emmerthal: The 15th edition of the international SiliconPV Conference took place from April 8 to 11, 2025, in Oxford, England. This venue marked a first in the history of the conference. Conference Chairs Sebastian Bonilla, as well as Matthew Wright and his team from the University of Oxford, did an excellent job of curating a high-quality scientific program while also creating a welcoming environment that fostered valuable personal exchange. They were supported by the scientific committee, which also includes ISFH.
In addition to presentations by invited experts from leading photovoltaic companies and international research institutions, the majority of the program consisted of peer-reviewed scientific contributions, evaluated through a double-blind review process. A total of 149 abstracts from 26 countries were submitted and reviewed by four independent reviewers each. As is tradition at SiliconPV, the ten highest-rated contributions were honored with the SiliconPV Award.
This year, ISFH had an especially successful showing, with two contributions making it into the top ten.
One was the paper by Daniel Beck and co-authors titled "The elasticity method: A new approach to determine recombination parameters from injection-dependent lifetime curves." In his work, Beck presented an improved method for more clearly identifying various recombination and thus loss pathways in silicon solar cells or their representative simplified test structures.
The second was the contribution by Udo Römer and co-authors titled "Selective laser ablation of single layers from SiO₂/poly-Si superlattices for patterning of highly efficient IBC solar cells." Using a laser-based fabrication process, Römer was able to move ISFH's previously more complexly produced solar cells closer to industrial scalability while nearly reproducing their high lab-level efficiency of ~26%.
Overall, the four exciting days of the conference demonstrated that photovoltaics remains full of compelling research questions. Even the namesake material, silicon—which accounts for 95% of today’s PV market—is far from fully optimized. Silicon-based solar cells still offer significant potential for efficiency improvements (and thus further reductions in already low electricity generation costs), as well as enhanced sustainability, which is crucial for photovoltaics at the multi-terawatt scale.