In the past decade, the state of the art Si-based electronics has gone from devices at or above 100 nm to the realm of 30 nm and below, with a defined pathway to devices, logic and memory, of about 15 nm. In addition, as devices have scaled below a gate length of about 100 nm performance per power density has not scaled, in fact it has decreased. In order to address the power issues the industry is facing as CMOS devices are scaled further, a program, Nanoelectronic Research Initiative, was...

This talk is an overview of the Battery 500 project, an interdisciplinary consortium lead by IBM Research to develop a lithium air battery that aims to increase the range of electrovehicles to 500 miles. Particular emphasis will be given to some of the key issues that have hampered the development of lithium air technology so far, and how we are solving them via an integrated experimental and first principle-based simulation approach.

More information on ICTP conferences are available at www.ictp.it

More information on ICTP conferences are available at www.ictp.it

Welcome and Introductory Remarks - Policy Session I

Welcome and Introductory Remarks - Policy Session I

Until recently Photovoltaics (PV) has been seen as a useful and elegant provider of electricity to interesting markets like powering of satellites, industrial off-grid solutions and consumer applications. Only few could foresee the enormous growth over the last decade and even more surprising to many was the associated price decrease. The volume growth of the worldwide PV market was mainly influenced by market support programs like the Feed-in tariff (EEG) in Germany in 2001 and followed by...

In the early 1990's, South Africa embarked on a program to massively expand grid access. After almost two decades, the story continues to unfold, and it is filled with lessons and examples that inform current thinking about energy policy and technology in other developing economies. South Africa is now in the early stages of a new effort to integrate renewables onto its grid system on an unprecedented scale. In this talk I will describe recent developments there, and relate them to equally...

Supercomputers capable of delivering Exaflops performance are envisioned to become a reality by the end of this decade. In order to provide the enormous communication bandwidth that is necessary, millions of optical interconnects will have to be deployed to connect together racks, modules and chips. Such massive level of parallelism will require monolithic integration of deeply scaled silicon nanophotonics devices in close proximity with transistors by utilizing the latest CMOS technology....

Issues related to morphology, crystallinity, and phase separation which are important in the development of efficient polymer based solar cells will be introduced and discussed. A versatile method to examine the donor-acceptor based bulk heterojunction structures developed in our laboratory will be discussed. The method was used to follow changes with annealing and different donor: acceptor ratios, where the correlation between the changes in the morphology and charge carrier generation was...

Energy, environment, health, food and water are the sectors of critical significance and concern to the world, especially to the rapidly developing countries. These fields are intertwined in many complex ways and our excessive dependence on polluting fuels has had extremely serious and progressively deleterious influence on the quality of our lives. Since energy drives the engines of growth, our increasing demand for energy is unavoidable in the face of development, but in the light of the...

One finds elastic liquids in the processing of plastics, processing of food, and in flowing biological fluids. They are in principle materials somewhere between viscous liquids and elastic solids. But their behaviour is not between that of a simple liquid or a simple solid. An example in the kitchen: water is ejected to the side walls of a bowl by a rotating whisk, while egg-whites climb the whisk. Further strange examples will be given. We seek an understanding of their behaviour.

Today there are more than 5 billion cell-phone users in the world, and the majority of these cellphones are being used in the developing parts of the world. This massive volume of wireless phone communication brings an enormous cost-reduction to cellphones despite their sophisticated hardware and software capabilities. Utilizing this advanced state-of-the-art of cell phone technology towards point-of-care diagnostics and/or microscopic imaging applications can offer numerous opportunities to...

Examples of realistic diagnostic optical equipment based on diode lasers, light- emitting diodes, optical fibres, compact spectrometers and lap-top computers are given. Experience from implementation in Africa, South America and China will be presented.

In this talk the speaker will illustrate the following ideas that were found to be among most important in achieving effective physics teaching: 1. Effective teaching should engage students in active construction and testing of ideas. Traditional teaching in most cases does not create opportunities for the students to actively construct and test their own ideas. Active construction and testing are important steps in achieving understanding. 2. Teaching in context can significantly increase...

Time-reversal invariance is a very fundamental concept in classical and quantum physics. The objective of this talk is to show how this concept can be turned into a huge source of innovations and successful start-up companies. It was first in the field of acoustics and later for microwaves, where antenna array technology was available, that "timereversal mirrors" have been built. Such mirrors allow us to refocuses in space and time an incident wave field at the original source location...

Current developments in the field of microfluidic technology allow accurate handling of liquid volumes in the nanoliter to microliter range, in miniaturized systems in which sensing elements to monitor chemical processes on-line can be integrated. This development is especially relevant for the field of chemical analysis in the life sciences where only limited sample volumes are available. This contribution will give a number of examples of integrated microfluidic devices which use sample...

More information on ICTP conferences are available at www.ictp.it

The prospects of current and coming solar-photovoltaic (PV) technologies are envisioned, arguing this solar- electricity source is beyond a tipping point in the complex worldwide energy outlook. Truly, a revolution in both the technological advancements of solar PV and the deployment of this energy technology is underway; PV is no longer an outlier. The birth of modern photovoltaics (PV) traces only to the mid-1950s, with the Bell Telephone Laboratories' development of an efficient,...

The field of organic photovoltaics (OPV) has advanced rapidly over the last several years to the point now of initial commercialization of small scale products. Recent demonstration of efficiencies of 10% and beyond by several groups around the world continue to propel interest in OPV as a potential low-cost, large-scale solar energy technology. This talk will provide an overview of the materials and approaches commonly used in the field today. The operational mechanisms of the devices will...

Ever since serious scientific thinking went into improving the efficiency of photovoltaic energy conversion more than 50 years ago, thermodynamics has been used to assess the limits to performance, guiding advances in materials science and photovoltaic technology. Photovoltaics have advanced considerably, resulting in single-junction solar cells with a record efficiency of 28.3% and multi-junction cells with an efficiency of 43.5%. As impressive as these advances are, these record...

This talk will present the role of Science and Technology in addressing some of the Societal Grand Challenges - such as energy technology, innovation, and sustainability. The speaker will discuss the need to address the basic-applied dichotomy and role of technology in spurring both basic science and economic development as an inter-related ecosystem.

There is no "silver bullet" solution to climate stress and development needs, but biofuels and bioenergy will be a necessary and substantial portion of the global energy portfolio. Biomass is the original 'alternative' energy. From a primary source of fuel, it has evolved to supply renewable energy services at levels spanning the very simple to the highly complex. As localized energy carriers with localized benefits that can smooth some of the heterogeneity in resource allocation, biofuels...

Astronomers and space scientists have made astonishing progress in probing our cosmic environment, thanks to advanced technology. We can trace cosmic history from some mysterious "beginning" nearly 14 billion years ago, and understand in outline the emergence of atoms, galaxies, stars and planets - and how, on at least one planet, life emerged and developed a complex biosphere of which we are part. But these advances pose new questions: What does the long-range future hold? How widespread is...

Quantum superposition and entanglement offer deep resources which are ripe for harnessing in practical devices. Superposition incorporates a phase with information content surpassing any classical mixture. Entanglement offers correlations stronger than any which would be possible classically. Together these give quantum computing its spectacular potential, but earlier applications may be found in metrology and sensing. Fundamental progress is being made in the development of quantum devices...