Current Award Winners

Calum Gordon is a doctoral candidate and postdoctoral research fellow at Victoria University Wellington – Te Herenga Waka in the group of Dr. Nathaniel Davis. He has been awarded the JEOL Brian Halton award for the paper “Heterostructured Nanotetrapod Luminophores for Reabsorption Elimination within Luminescent Solar Concentrators” published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
Luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) concentrate light via luminescence within a planar-lightguide (glass or plastic). This luminescence originates from a material known as a luminophore, dispersed in the LSCs to assist in the lightguide effect. Light is guided to solar panels coupled to the edges of the LSCs. As a result, LSCs have potential use for building-integrated solar panels. The commercialisation and potential applications of LSCs are currently hindered greatly by light reabsorption, where light emitted from the luminophore is parasitically reabsorbed by itself.
Calum’s selected paper represents the first ever use of tetrapod nanocrystal systems in LSCs as a way to reduce reabsorption. This is a significant achievement in this field and will likely lead to a new subset of research for luminescent solar concentrators. This work significantly improves the commercial viability of LSCs.