As the age of fossil fuels is coming to an end, now more than ever there is the need for more efficient and sustainable renewable energy technologies. This presentation will give an overview on recent developments in solar technologies that may address, in part the energy challenge. In particular, nanostructured materials synthesized via plasma based approaches present an opportunity for future generation low cost manufacturing of devices [1]. We demonstrate various multifunctional materials, namely materials that exhibit more than one functionality, and structure/property relationships in such systems, including new strategies for the synthesis of multifunctional nanoscale materials to be used for applications in electronics and photovoltaics [2-31].

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