- 20 July 2006 -

Eicke Weber comes home to take up post as Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems

After 23 years of research in the USA, most recently as a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, Eicke Weber is coming home to Germany. On July 1, the 56-year-old materials researcher will become director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg. He succeeds Professor Joachim Luther, who has headed Europe’s largest solar energy research institute since 1993 and is now retiring.

Eicke R. Weber is a physicist and has taught Materials Science at the University of California in Berkeley since 1983. He initially went there as an assistant professor. Weber’s scientific career began with the study of physics at the University of Cologne, where he wrote his degree dissertation on inclusions in silicon. He obtained his doctorate in 1976 with a thesis on “Point Defects in Deformed Silicon”. After conducting postdoctoral research at the State University of New York, Albany, USA and at Lund University in Sweden, he returned to Cologne where he qualified as a professor in 1983, publishing a fundamental study of “Transition Metals in Silicon” which is frequently cited in literature to this day. That same year he joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed to the interdisciplinary Chair of Nanoscale Science and Engineering Graduate Group in March 2004.

Weber has earned an international reputation as a materials researcher for defects in silicon and III-V semiconductors such as GaAs and GaN. He and his research group have published over 580 papers, and he is co-editor of the Academic Press book series “Semiconductors and Semimetals”.

In the early 1990s, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, USA, led by Prof. Weber reported the first evidence of superconductivity in III-Vs. However, they were disappointed to later find that they had made GaAs superconductive, i.e. having zero resistance at 10K, thanks to a contaminant. Eicke Weber explained that indium had diffused from a template on which they made the sample. Indium contaminant was found to be responsible for the conduction but the exact mechanism remained a mystery. That said, they were able to report their ability to consistently make such layered thin films having III-Vs with superconductivity.

In 1997 he was a founding member of the “Silicon Wafer Engineering and Defect Science” consortium, whose members today comprise twelve firms and nine university groups all over the world. Over the last few years, Weber’s research group in Berkeley gained important insights into material defects in solar silicon. They discovered that the critical factor in contaminated silicon is not how many transition metals it contains, but how widely those metals are distributed. Even cells with a high metal content still had a good electricity yield if the metals were concentrated in only a few places. This gave Weber the idea of using “dirty” silicon for the manufacture of solar cells.

Until now, the manufacture of solar cells has required the same kind of high purity, expensive silicon that is produced for the chip industry. “Using dirty silicon could enable the global solar energy industry to take a quantum leap forward,” is how Weber describes the implication of this concept. The solar energy industry could cut costs significantly and would be able to circumvent the shortage of high-purity silicon.

Weber is convinced that the dirty silicon can be manipulated by temperature treatment in such a way as to concentrate the metals it contains into just a few clusters. The solar energy industry would no longer need the elaborate cleaning process for high-purity silicon that has been used until now. Eicke Weber intends to pursue this focus of research in Freiburg. But he also believes that the ISE can be instrumental in achieving significant progress in other fields of solar energy, too, over the next few years. This was what attracted him to the job in Freiburg: “I am looking forward to being able to influence the propagation of solar energy at a decisive juncture, particularly as the next ten years will be very exciting in this respect.”

Concurrently with his appointment as director of the Fraunhofer ISE, Eicke Weber is also the new incumbent of the Chair of Applied Physics, Solar Energy, at the University of Freiburg. “The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is proud to have been able to recruit such a prestigious scientist, who has made a career at one of the world’s leading universities in the USA, as director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems,” said Dr. Ulrich Buller, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Senior Vice President Research Planning, in his welcoming speech in honour of the new director.

Professor Weber has been decorated with numerous awards and fellowships. He received an IBM Faculty Development Award in 1984, the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in 1994, and was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. He was appointed as visiting professor of Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan in 1990 and of Kyoto University, Japan in 2000. In December 2003 he was invited to hold the Zhu KheZhen lecture at Zeijang University, Hangzhou, China. Professor Weber served as founding president of the Berkeley chapter of the Alexander von Humboldt Association of America (AvHAA) in 1996 and was president of the AvHAA from 2001 to 2003. In June 2006 he was awarded the German Cross of Merit on ribbon.

For someone who has been part of the American research system, with the substantially higher salaries that it offers, it is not easy to return to Germany. Professor Weber is well acquainted with the problem; he has committed himself wholeheartedly to building bridges between Germany and the USA, founding the German Scholars Organization in 2003. This association of German scientists living and working abroad aims to foster contacts with the “old country” and thus facilitate the scientists’ return to Germany. Now the president of the organization has himself followed the call of his native country.

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