Last week, the MRS Spring Meeting took place in San Francisco. It was my first time there, but certainly not the last! 
I enjoyed it immensely, despite my extensive last minute preparations of the talk I was invited to give… another first timer for me (on an international conference). In case you are interested, find the slides on scribd. Prof. Venkateswara Bommisetty, one of the organisers of the GG symposium told me that the slides of invited talks will also be made available (if the authors agree).
Many interesting talks, too many to go into more detail in the given time!;-) Anyway, it was nice to meet Alex (glidera) and his colleague Bertrand in person, and spend time with Andy B and Tom!
It was difficult (if not impossible) to agree with Alan Heeger and Robert Street on their propositions that monomolecular recombination is the limiting factor for organic bulk heterojunction solar cells at short circuit current under one sun illumination. Thus, despite both of them being well-known and highly respected, I allow myself to express my strong belief (supported by transient experiments and macroscopic simulations;-) that bimolecular polaron recombination is the dominant loss mechanism for free polarons, instead of monomolecular polaron recombination. Maybe more on this later.
During the conference, and featured in the talk of Karl Leo, Heliatek announced another efficiency record for small molecule solar cells, enhancing their recent achievements to now 7.7% certified efficiency for a tandem cell with 1.1cm2. Again, my congratulations, great stuff!
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Street et al present an “experimental test” for geminate recombination [Street 2010a]. They investigate P3HT:PC60BM nor PCDTBT:PC70BM bulkheterojunction solar cells with a transient current technique at 200K and 300K between -1 and 1V external voltage bias. The authors conclude that neither exhibit significant geminate recombination, while pointing out that
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