PERSEPHONe is the acronym of the project “PERovskite SEmiconductors for PHOtoNics”

PERSEPHONe is a multidisciplinary and intersectoral effort which will develop a novel technological platform for photonics based on hybrid metal-halides perovskite semiconductors with the potential make it commercially viable.

The project main objectives are:

To generate new skills, knowledge and innovation
To develop a novel technological platform for photonics based on metal-halide perovskite semiconductors

The proposed “European Training Network on PERovskite SEmiconductors for PHOtoNics (PERSEPHONe)” aims to train a new generation of early-stage researchers (ESRs) in the emerging area of photonics. Through research on co-supervised individual projects focusing on selected applications, PERSEPHONe will make significant contributions to the fundamental scientific understanding and technical knowhow. Targeted application areas include materials synthesis, photonic (and optoelectronic) devices and integrated circuits fabrication, characterization, and modeling, upscaling and manufacturing together with a powerful set of soft skills.

In addition to technical training through PhD courses, dedicated tutorials, and workshops organized by the Network, the ESRs will benefit from a wide range of complementary non-technical training activities such as entrepreneurship, authoring scientific papers/patents, dissemination, etc. The participation of industrial partners will further promote research training with commercialization perspectives enabling ESRs to fully integrate theory with hands-on practice.

Research

Photonic applications are ubiquitous, in many areas from everyday life to the most advanced science. They include lighting, light detection, telecommunications, information processing, photonic computing, metrology, as well as spectroscopy, holography, medicine (surgery, vision correction, endoscopy, health monitoring), towards military technology, laser material processing, art diagnostics agriculture, and robotics. It has seen a tremendous evolution in the last twenty years driven mainly by a change in the way technology has pervaded our lives. Such diversity requires more and more technology that is efficient, chameleonic and sustainable.

PERSEPHONe will leverage on the wide synthetic versatility of the perovskite structure to further boost the material’s optoelectronic properties targeting the specific needs for photonic applications. These materials have impressive optoelectronic properties and they can be engineered to achieve a large set of functionalities whose integration could lead to important improvement to Silicon photonics, Silicon (Oxy)Nitride and other established technological platforms.

To achieve this aim, PERSEPHONe has the following research objectives:

Developing materials for photonic applications (WP1),
Developing building block devices for photonics, such as LEDs, detectors, amplifiers, lasers and quantum sources (WP2)
Development of Photonic Integrated Circuits (WP3)

The proposed research programme builds upon 3 key technical Work packages (WPs).