Julia Wiktor, Associate Professor at the Department of Physics, has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The grant is given to promising researchers at the beginning of their careers and aims to help them pursue their own projects and ideas, as well as shape their research groups.
This year, a total of 494 researchers have been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council, with 22 of them based in Sweden. Julia Wiktor, computational materials physics researcher, receives 1.5 million euros for her project “Harnessing Localized Charges for Advancing Polar Materials Engineering” after an extensive selection process that spanned nearly a year.
“When I got the news, I felt a mix of relief and disbelief, and I had to read the emails several times. The ERC application process is quite intense and stressful, especially at the interview stage. After the interview, I was cautiously hopeful but had already accepted the potential rejection. Now, I am very happy and grateful that it worked out, and I am excited to start the project and collaborate with the new people I will be able to hire,” says Julia Wiktor.
Her research focuses on emerging materials for modern optoelectronic applications, such as solar energy harvesting and LEDs. Using advanced electronic structure methods, she studies how the properties of functional semiconductors are affected by complex physical phenomena occurring at the atomic scale.
“The ERC Starting Grant is a very generous grant. It means that my research group can now dedicate focused efforts to charge localisation, a topic I find important and fascinating. Additionally, it will boost the visibility of our research internationally,” says Julia Wiktor.
The project focuses on how charge localisation, specifically the behaviour of polarons and self-trapped excitons, can be utilised in functional materials. In many applications, the so-called excess charges are fundamental to a device's operation.
“For example, in solar cells, light generates electron-hole pairs that can be converted into electricity. In LEDs, current creates these pairs, and their recombination produces light. Typically, it is assumed that extra electrons and holes are spread over large areas within the material. However, in many useful materials, these charges can become localised around one or several atomic sites—a process known as trapping or localisation. This is often viewed as detrimental, but our previous work has shown that it can also have positive effects,” explains Julia Wiktor.
Julia Wiktor's project aims to understand the interplay between the negative and positive aspects of charge trapping and to explore how this effect can be harnessed.
“The goal is to develop a new approach in materials engineering, which can be called polaron engineering. That could enhance applications such as solar cells, LED devices, and water-splitting cells,” says Julia Wiktor.
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- Associate Professor, Condensed Matter and Materials Theory, Physics