Klaus Lips

Curriculum Vitae

I went to elementary school in Hofheim/Ts. (close to Frankfurt) from 1968-1972. In 1972 I visited the Grammar school in Naperville, Ill. USA. From 1973-1981 I stayed at the Deutsche Schule Den Haag in The Hague, Netherlands.

From 1981-82 I studied physics at the Rijksuniversiteit in Leiden, Netherlands and from 1982-1987 at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg, Germany

I received my Diploma in Physics from the Universität in Marburg, working on "Photoluminecence studies of amorphous Silicon-Carbon alloys".

I received my Phd als from the Universität of Marburg on "Spin-dependent transport and recombination in films an solar cells from amorphous silicon". The work was accomplished in the amorphous silicon group of Prof. Dr. W. Fuhs.

From 1994 to 1996 I was a Post Doc at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, USA, working with Richard Crandall, Thomas Unold and Howard Branz on transient capacitance spectroscopy in disordered semiconductors.

In 1996 I became a scientific staff member at the former hahn-meitner-Institute (now HZB) in Adlershof. Here, I set-up an ESR and photoluminescence laboratory.

From 2005 - 2006 I was acting head of the departmement Silicon Photovoltaics. Currently I am deputy director of the Institute Silicon Photovoltaics at HZB.

Current research

The main focus of the research projects of Klaus Lips lies in the area of the charge carrier and defect dynamics in thin-film silicon for photovoltaic applications.

Klaus Lips is founder and spokesman of the interdisciplinary BMBF network "EPR-Solar" which is devoted to investigate defect states and their creation mechanism in thin-film silicon using EPR-based methods with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. The aim of “EPR-Solar” is the complete identification of defects in amorphous and microcrystalline silicon as well as the clarification of the microscopic mechanism of the so-called Staebler-Wronski effect which is responsible for the degradation of the electronic properties of amorphous silicon. With the fusion of BESSY II and Hahn-Meitner-Institut a novel Terahertz EPR Spectrometer was constructed and taken into operation at BESSY II which allows the investigation of spin systems with extremely high zero field coupling. In addition, a novel 263 GHz pulsed EPR-Spectrometer is put into operation in the end of 2009. With this new instrument, the EPR center at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin will have worldwide unique capabilities for the research of spin systems in solar materials.

For more details see About Me.