Mohammad Al-Amin, a final year PhD student working with Dr John Murphy, has won a prize for his research at one of the leading US conferences in his field. Mohammad won the award on 7^th June 2016 at the 43^rd IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in Portland, Oregon, for his presentation entitled “Hydrogenation effect on low temperature internal gettering in multicrystalline silicon”. Silicon solar cells account for >90% of the market and Mohammad’s work aims to develop a process to lower their production cost. The approach developed relies on trapping impurities at a limited number of sites within the bulk of the material to have an overall positive effect on carrier lifetime.

The ultimate aspiration is to enable the use of more contaminated feedstocks and to increase production yields. Mohammad’s work has also recently been accepted for publication in Journal of Applied Physics, and his paper will appear online later this month.