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Women have made significant contributions to applied physics research and development, and their participation is vital to continued progress. Recognizing these contributions is important for encouraging increased involvement and creating an equitable environment in which women can thrive. This Roadmap on Women in Applied Physics, written by women scientists and engineers, is intended to celebrate women’s accomplishments, highlight established and early career researchers enlarging the boundaries in their respective fields, and promote increased visibility for the impact women have on applied physics research. Perspectives cover the topics of plasma materials processing and propulsion, super-resolution microscopy, bioelectronics, spintronics, superconducting quantum interference device technology, quantum materials, 2D materials, catalysis and surface science, fuel cells, batteries, photovoltaics, neuromorphic computing and devices, nanophotonics and nanophononics, and nanomagnetism. Our intent is to inspire more women to enter these fields and encourage an atmosphere of inclusion within the scientific community.

Thin-film solar cells, due to their low material usage and flexible substrates compatibility, have the potential to fill market niches for photovoltaic (PV) technologies. Among them, the Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (CIGS) solar cell is a widely deployed mature technology. However, the usage of scarce material like Ga and In is considered a major hindrance for its further scaling up. The commercial opportunity of its promising counterpart Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) with a similar structure but low-cost potential, has not yet been fully recognized. In this paper, the bottom-up approach is used to build models of cost analysis for CZTS on the different substrates with their probability distribution simulated by the Monte Carlo method. The resulting production costs are $41–52 per m2, making them economically attractive. Prospective strategies for further cost reduction are also suggested. The fundamental technical features of CZTS are reviewed, identifying the large efficiency potential of this PV technology. Analysis of different market opportunities is performed to fit the market demands better. Moreover, possible constraints and promising pathways towards the commercialization of the emerging CZTS technology are proposed.

Significant resources are devoted to developing new and improving existing photovoltaic (PV) technologies in areas of performance, cost and market attractiveness. Techno-economic analysis can be used to evaluate the current and potential commercial attractiveness of prospective technologies from these perspectives, and can guide research and investment directions to commercialise such technologies. Rigorous analysis can be difficult to conduct for emerging technologies because of the heavy resource requirement to gather accurate manufacturing cost, module performance and market study data, some of which are unavailable to the research community or are highly uncertain. This thesis reports new methods developed to allow such analysis to be completed with reduced resources, since precise data for every input parameter is not needed. Instead, the method allows for an uncertainty range to be assumed for each of the many cost, performance and market parameters. These uncertainties are combined via a Monte Carlo simulation to calculate commercially relevant metrics such as manufacturing cost, module selling price and manufacturer's margin, together with an uncertainty estimate. Conclusions and research directions can be found by examining the probability distribution of these outputs and by using other metrics and analyses developed in this work such as normalised uncertainty, simultaneous Monte Carlo analysis and analysis of variance. This method has been applied to a perovskite on glass technology and a roll-to-roll processed flexible perovskite technology. This analysis identified the key cost drivers that need to be addressed, such as the high cost of the metal electrode and the hole transport medium material. It calculated module efficiency and lifetime targets that would allow these technologies to compete with established PV technologies in both the fixed plate and flexible PV markets. The method has also been applied to variations of standard c-Si technologies - a

Polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) thin-film solar cell is one of promising technologies for low cost photovoltaic electricity generation. Such cells are made of a ~2 μm thin poly-Si diode structure formed on a low-cost glass superstrate. Because the glass cannot withstand prolonged treatments at temperatures much higher than its critical points, to obtain poly-Si material with acceptable electronic quality the precursor a-Si thin films with cell structure are typically crystallised at the standard temperature of 600°C for 20 hrs. This lengthy annealing time leading to a large thermal budget and low throughput diminishes attractiveness of poly-Si thin film on glass solar cells. Moreover, this standard solid-phase crystallisation (SPC) results in high defect density in poly-Si, which is a major performance limiting factor. Therefore, improving poly-Si quality is the main objective of the SPC study. The focus of this thesis is SPC of Si thin-film solar cells on glass deposited by electron-beam (E-beam) evaporation, plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD), and their combination (Hybrid). The study aims to achieve the following goals: (i) to develop better understanding of SPC stages, including incubation, nucleation and crystal growth, for Si films with the solar cell structure; (ii) to identify how these stages, the resulting poly-Si thin-film quality and solar cells performance depend on SPC conditions, (iii) to find out how the film structure, i.e. dopant concentrations and the layer thicknesses, affects the crystallisation kinetics and the resulting cell performance, (iv) to examine the effects of pre-annealing conditions on the crystallisation kinetics and the resulting cell performance.The SPC of PECVD, Hybrid and E-beam poly-Si solar cell structures is studied by four characterisation techniques at different temperatures of 600, 640 and 680°C. The random nucleation in Si thin-film solar cell structures is demonstrated by transmission electron micr