Tandems!

When I set out to update my blog tonight I was planning on posting something else. As i was getting ready to upload a photo the first directory that opened when I pressed insert picture was my solar cell data directory. So i figured it must be meant to be this way after all! I came home quite late today as I spent more than 12 hours doing measurements, giving a talk and preparing another presentation. I will be presenting a paper in a couple of weeks at the World Conference for Photovoltaic Energy Conversion and today was the deadline for submitting my presentation. As usual I left everything for the last minute but it wasn't entirely my fault. It is common in the PhD community that when you reach a deadline then things start happening rapidly! i.e the samples you have been waiting for months finally arrive and you have one last chance of producing data that are barely presentable. And of course at the same time you are expected to pack all the labs and move because some idiot has decided that, since we've been waiting for our "new" labs that are more than 3 months late, we have to move overnight! Anyway I might sound bitter but it i enjoy it. So The two pictures above are the things that I have been struggling over for two years now, and will do for one more year. They go by a quite fancy name: Strain Balanced Multi-Quantum Well Dual Junction Monolithic Tandem Solar Cells. If you cross this again chances are you might see my name somewhere along there. And before I forget: thanks Keith for not saying how horrible my presentation was today and the help into making it a descent one in the end. Enough with my post-midnight rant. I am off to bed!