1. March 2010
I finished the Review article I was 
recently talking about. If you are interested, the preprint can be accessed here (in a few hours, 20:00 EST according to arXiv, so be patient;-) [Update 2nd March 2010] It’s up:-)
Reviews seem to be pretty subjective, and I am sure there are many omissions, but hopefully not too many inconsistencies. If there are any particular things you do like or do not like, or which are plain wrong: I am happy about every bit of constructive criticism! I submitted the article to Rep. Prog. Phys. It will be peer-reviewed, and I am pretty sure the referees’ comments will make the current version much less final as I’d like it to be;-)
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Posted by deibel
24. February 2010
Via Die Zeit and Nature:
The DFG, Germany’s main funding agency, 
just put down new guidelines for proposals. Starting in July, the proposals should contain only two directly relevant publications per year of requested funding, as well as up to five other papers (presumably the most important ones) covering the researcher’s general background. Matthias Kleiner, DFG president:
It is quality, not quantity, which matters.
Good point. Nevertheless, although the publish and perish mentality lately became quite tiring, I wonder if (how quickly) these new conditions will change the mentality of the researchers in general, and in particular the ones who are reviewing the proposals and are sitting in the committees for professorship appointment;-)
[Update 25.2.2010] Find the original DFG statement here (pdf, german).
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Posted by deibel
8. February 2010
There is an interesting post on The Scholarly Kitchen on Talking About Science vs. Doing Science, a critical view on Web 2.0 for Scientists. 
Every second spent blogging, chatting on FriendFeed, or leaving comments on a PLoS paper is a second taken away from other activities. Those other activities have direct rewards towards advancement.
Actually, this is one of the reasons for the low activity in recent months: I just do not have time for the blog right now – I believe I can write again end of March or so. Nevertheless, I am active, having written proposals (1 won, 1 open) as well as two review-like papers. One of them is on Organic Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cells, the other on the Role of the Charge Transfer State for Organic Photovoltaics. Writing a third one right now… Once they are published (if they ever are), I will link to them. You are likely to find some figures etc familiar from the blog… and finally something to properly reference 
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Posted by deibel
9. December 2009
From Wikiquote, after reading Scott Berkun. Not funny (as some of these), but thoughful (who’d have expected that? 
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.
Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.
In his book Making Things Happen, the above-mentioned Scott Berkun summarizes Karl Popper as saying that there are only two kinds of theories: those that are wrong and those that are incomplete.
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3. December 2009
Via pv-tech. Brief note on efficiency record: Solarmer has managed to get an (NREL certified) power conversion efficiency of 7.9% for an organic solar cell… sounds good, and broke the recent record (by the same company). It is important to mention, though, that the active area was very small with 0.1cm2 (aperture 0.047cm2).
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28. November 2009
Many people believe that organic photovoltaics companies will have to prove soon that 
they can come up with commercially viable products within the next two-three years. In this context, Heliatek, a Germany based company developing organic small molecule solar cells with high efficiency, has received 18 Million Euros in a second round of funding from venture capitalists and others. From the press release:
Heliatek will be utilizing the new funding primarily to build an initial production facility in Dresden. In this step and right through to mass production, the company will be using its proprietary tandem technology to efficiently produce, flexible and very lightweight PV modules on a film substrate. Their weight will be merely 500 grams per square meter, instead of today’s customary 20 kilograms per square meter. This will open up a forward-looking market for mobile applications, for architectural solutions and for independently supplying regions with weak infrastructures.
Indeed, interesting times for OPV – particularly in view of the commercial aspects! The science aspects are also getting more and more interesting, but unfortunately I thus have less and less time to write about them here…
P.S. Another company Solexant just starts the production of hybrid solar cells after the process developed by the group of Paul Alivisatos at Berkeley, as reported by Technology Review.
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Posted by deibel
24. September 2009
Great comical contribution of Jorge Cham’s PhD Comics: 
Nature vs Science
The Nature Journal liked it, as apparent from their blog post According to Jorge Cham, their general comment was:
Use this comic for procrastination or decompression, as you see fit.
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Posted by deibel
1. September 2009
Less sad than the recent Note on publishing a scientific comment… 
As I am in a constant process of trying to understand the requirements for publishing high-impact scientific papers better (slow process… , I am always eager to see what others write about it.
Recently, I linked to some PLOS editorials about Ten simple rules for nearly everything, including writing papers.
Along this line, the presentation given by the Phys. Rev. Lett. Editor Manolis Antonoyiannakis in Japan end of last year, is very interesting. In addition to hints for using the right phrasing when writing about scientific results, he also gives some insight – from the viewpoint of the Editorial Office of a high impact phyics journal – into the inner workings of paper predecision (by Editor) and general acceptance rate. Read the rest of this entry »
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26. August 2009
Just a quick addition to Mobility and Efficiency of Polymer Solar Cells. You might remember that with increasing mobility, the
open circuit voltage Voc, however, decreases steadily. Actually, the slope steepness is maximum due to our implicit assumption of ideal charge extraction ; for a realistic charge extraction (= finite surface recombination), the Voc slope with mobility is weaker… or even constant for zero surface recombination. The fill factor is maximum at intermediate charge carrier mobilities, not far from the experimentally found values!
As we were finally able to calculate the open circuit voltage with a surface recombination less than infinity (thanks to Alexander Wagenpfahl),
I can show you how it looks. ([Update 3rd March 2010] For details, have a look here: [Wagenpfahl 2010, arxiv]) Read the rest of this entry »
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