I would like to confirm the efficiency improvement due to effective light scattering from plasmonic nanostructures. My experiments were carried out on nontexturised silicon solar ells. In both cases when silver nanopaticles were deposited on bare cell surface or within antireflection layer increase of efficiency was about 5% or more connected with gain of short circuit current. These are very promising results for further studies.

About 5 pm on the first day of scientific trip I got to the Cap Europe, where I was accommodated. The conference should begin on Monday 14 of May but on Sunday Young Scientist Tutorial on characterization techniques for thin film solar cells took place then and I wanted to participate in this event. After general introduction, admittance measurements techniques followed by thermodynamic defects simulation were presented. At that time I have registered. As I found later about 2 thousand persons partook in this conference. Fields of interest were divided on 25 Symposia, with many of them close to photovolaics. Numerous presentations were giving every day parallel in distinct lecture rooms from 8:30 am to 6 pm with two half-hour long coffee breaks and two-hour long lunch break in the noon. For me the most interesting Symposia were : Symp. O - Applied Nanoplasmonics: Nanoplasmonic Functional Materials and Devices, Symp. Y – Advance Materials and Characterization Techniques for Solar Cells, Symp. A – Advanced Silicon Materials Research for Electronic and Photovoltaic Applications III. I chose a few oral presentations from other symposia as well. On Tuesday during poster session with my supervisor Ph.D. Lipinski we were presenting our results on “Antireflection TiOx coating with plasmonic metal nanoparticles for silicon solar cells”. Our stand enjoyed quite a lot of interest. On other days I attended in poster sessions of rest of symposia as well. Wednesday was the day when plenary session was given by group of five outstanding scientist. The lectures was related to self-assembling materials, organoelectronics, plasmonics and tissues and organs engineering. After that young scientist was awarded for their outstanding contribution to development of knowledge closely related to each Symposium. In the evening the was a small banquet. Whole conference ended with last common lunch in Friday noon. It was for me great experience to be there, get know so many wise people and see present status of materials sciences. After conference I got possibility to publish an article in “Plasmonics” magazine.

In April I had an opportunity to give a talk in our institute about my work and planned PhD thesis. I spend quite a lot of time preparing my slides and putting my knowledge in right order. Then I wrote and submitted an abstract for the XXII Conference on Applied Crystallography concerning frequencies of occurrence of symmetric boundaries among random grain boundaries in polycrystalline materials exhibiting various crystal symmetry.

May, May May…just reflecting on this shortest of months, in terms of the number of characters in its name of course! In May I cooked mostly that is to say I busied myself with preparing a concoction. I mixed together ethanol and orthoposphoric acid, which was to give a solution badly needed for making thin foils for our TEM studies. Something hasn’t gone according to plan though and the concoction turned out not to be as effective as the previous one. That left me with no other choice but to make another one. Trying maybe to change one of the ingredients. Can’t change both!
In May I also started writing up, no, no, no, not my thesis, but my first article. Aye, aye! I put together all of the results and tried to squeeze some sense out of it. The coming months taught me however that life ain't easy and I will have to practice my scientific writing skills a bit more. TOUGH! Howerla

I attended a workshop titled "Texture Analysis with MTEX emphasasing EBSD Data Analysis" which took place in Freiberg, Germany at the TU Bergakademie. The most interesting part focused on reconstruction and analysis of 3D EBSD data, in particular on grain reconstraction, meshing and smoothing surface of grain boundaries.