Prof. Henning Sirringhaus FRS

Biography

Henning Sirringhaus holds the Hitachi Professorship of Electron Device Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory. He has an undergraduate and PhD degree in physics from ETH Zürich (CH). From 1995-1996 he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University (USA). He has been working in Cambridge in the field of charge transport in organic semiconductors and their application in field-effect transistors since 1997. In 2000 he co-founded Plastic Logic Ltd, a technology start-up company commercialising printed organic transistor technology.

Research

I am interested in scientific understanding of the charge and spin transport and photophysics of organic semiconductors, other carbon-based semiconductors as well as low-temperature processible hybrid organic-inorganic semiconductors. Organic semiconductors show a rich variety of transport phenomena which are not exhibited by conventional inorganic semiconductors such as silicon. Understanding of transport on the molecular scale requires sophisticated experimental techniques, and we have developed a broad range of electrical transport, optical spectroscopy, and scanning probe techniques to characterize these processes. We are also interested in applications of these materials in flexible electronics, spintronics as well as energy devices, in particular, thermoelectric waste heat conversion. The unique physics of molecular materials opens up new physical approaches for harvesting thermal energy and converting it into useful electricity.