Blog

We are proud to have supported our customer RhySearch in Switzerland with equipment for their Ion Beam Sputtering of 2D Materials project.For this project, we supported RhySearch with the design and manufacturing of the complete vacuum system. The core of the project is the UHV vacuum chamber, which was manufactured and delivered by the Kurt J. Lesker Company. We also supplied most of the relevant equipment around the vacuum chamber, including motion manipulation parts, vacuum pumps, gauges, feedthroughs and valves.

At Kurt J. Lesker we are committed to sustainability and our environmental, societal and economic responsibility as a company. As part of our sustainability goals, we are ensuring the efficient use of energy throughout our business, including conserving energy and giving preference to renewable energy sources.

The Kurt J. Lesker Company is expanding!

The Kurt J. Lesker Company is proud to announce our brand-new office and distribution centre in Dresden, Germany. This represents an exciting next step in our expansion of the Kurt J. Lesker Company into mainland Europe, where we will be able to serve our EU customers with dedicated local support and fast delivery from our fully stocked Dresden warehouse.

The Kurt J Lesker Company has been providing Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) systems to support photovoltaics (PV) research for more than 20 years and continues to support scientists globally to advance this critical renewable energy application. Solar cells work by using materials that absorb photons from sunlight in a broad spectral range and in turn effectively convert this captured light into free charges that produce electricity. Modern commercial solar cells are mainly based on crystalline Silicon, which is a cheap and abundant semiconductor^[1]. In recent decades, alternative thin film technologies based on materials combinations including Copper indium gallium diselenide (Cu(In,Ga)Se₂ or CIGS), Cadmium Telluride (CdTe), amorphous silicon and organic photovoltaics (OPV) have emerged with high efficiencies coupled with good cell stability, low manufacturing costs and come with the advantage of being a thin film, being both lightweight and flexible^[2].

Pittsburgh, PA - Kurt J. Lesker Company ("KJLC") today announced that it has acquired substantially all of the assets of KDF Electronics & Vacuum Services, Inc. ("KDF" or "KDF Technologies, LLC") through an asset purchase agreement.

KDF Electronics & Vacuum Services, Inc. will become known as KDF Technologies, LLC as of 12/31/2021. KDF will continue to operate independent of KJLC while leveraging some shared services.

Organic electronics research has advanced rapidly over the past few decades, with organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) now being commonly available in commercial devices such as mobile phones and TVs. Organic photovoltaics (OPVs, or organic solar cells) have potential to follow OLEDs as a commercially viable technology, but a number of challenges still need to be overcome. A recent publication from an international collaboration, with lead authors Prof. Moritz Riede (University of Oxford) and Dr. Ivan Ramirez (Heliatek GmbH), has investigated the degradation pathways of OPV devices using a common organic material, C₆₀, generating understanding which may prove critical to achieve long-term device stability. The complete solar cell structures used in the study were produced using a Kurt J. Lesker SPECTROS evaporation system.

Systems evacuated with oil-based pumps may be victims of backstreaming of pump oil vapors into the fore- line, vacuum chamber, and upstream throughout the system. The back- streaming referred to here is the act of pump oil vapors moving against the flow of molecules traveling from the vacuum chamber to the pump(s). In this case, we refer to these oil vapors as moving upstream, and eventually into the vacuum chamber. At high pressures, where the number of molecules from the chamber outnumber pump oil vapor molecules emanating from the pumping system, flow upstream is greatly mitigated. Oil vapor back- streaming is significantly more pronounced at lower operating pressures.

Mina Shahmohammadi from the research group of Professor Christos G. Takoudis, Full Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in collaboration with College of Dentistry, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Kurt J. Lesker Company recently developed conformal atomic layer deposition (ALD) based titanium (IV) oxide (TiO₂) thin film processes on Polymethyl Methacrylate (PMMA) displaying excellent surface and mechanical properties for potential engineering, medical, and biomedical applications. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Materials Science.

The Kurt J Lesker Company has been shipping Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) tools into the field of perovskite solar cells for the last decade and continues to support researchers in this exciting application. Our partner, Dr. Sascha J. Wolter, along with the Future Technologies Photovoltaics group, headed by Dr. Sarah Kajari-Schröder, at the Institute for Solar Energy Research (ISFH) in Hamelin, Germany, have presented a method to determine the acoustic impedance ratio (Z) for two perovskite precursors that are commonly co-deposited using PVD. In their paper "Determination and influence evaluation of the acoustic impedance ratio for thermal evaporation"^[1] they report Z values for methylammonium iodide (MAI) of 0.025 ±0.002 and 0.11 ±0.01 for lead (II) iodide (PbI2). Furthermore, the impact of using an incorrect Z-ratio on actual experimental thermal evaporations is investigated.

To celebrate Women's History Month, we spoke with Cindy Lesker who is currently an Owner, Chairwoman, and Vice President of Information Technology at the Kurt J. Lesker Company. Earlier this year, Cindy was a finalist for the prestigious CIO of the Year award by the Pittsburgh Technology Council.

We caught up with Cindy to find out about her journey to being the Chairwoman and CIO of KJLC and what Women's History Month means to her.