Fundamentals of Energy Conversion Processes
A DFG Cluster of Excellence
Proton-coupled electron transfer: Deciphered with high pressure
Chemists reveal mechanisms of proton-coupled electron transfer – a key to energy conversion.
The Power of Absence
How tiny metal vacancies improve solar hydrogen technologies.
About e-conversion
e-conversion is a Cluster of Excellence funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) with a focus on investigating fundamental mechanisms of energy conversion processes.
Today’s sustainable energy research gains momentum by targeting specific energy technologies and their related materials. The cluster e-conversion instead strives to establish a complementary paradigm that bridges major energy conversion strategies ranging from photovoltaics over (photo)electrocatalysis to batteries by focusing on the materials interfaces that underlie these functions. Critical bottlenecks like recombination and relaxation losses, overpotentials, and resistances presently arise due to insufficient control of microscopic excitation and energy conversion (e-conversion) processes at these interfaces. e-conversion therefore merges the powerful concepts of nanoscience and mechanistic energy research to create well-defined and tunable reference systems, and to establish fundamental understanding through their comprehensive (operando) characterization.
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e-conversion Conference 2025
We are looking forward to our e-conversion conference in Tutzing in September 2025!
Recent Publications
A low-cost and high-energy aqueous potassium-ion battery Journal Article
In: Journal of Energy Chemistry, vol. 106, pp. 523-531, 2025, ISSN: 2095-4956.
The Interaction of Sub-Monolayer Ta Adatoms and Clusters with Oxygen at the Pt(111) Interface Journal Article
In: The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, vol. 129, no. 13, pp. 6511-6523, 2025, ISSN: 1932-7447.
Lanthanide single-atom catalysts for efficient CO2-to-CO electroreduction Journal Article
In: Nature Communications, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 2985, 2025, ISSN: 2041-1723.