Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

In recent years, researchers have been trying to create increasingly efficient solar technologies and more sustainable battery designs. Among emerging sustainable energy solutions are solar batteries, systems that can store the energy collected by solar cells or photovoltaic (PV) systems.

A research group at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, supervised by Prof. Bettina Lotsch, recently introduced a sustainable integrated solar battery design based on materials that abundant on Earth. Their design, presented in a paper published in Energy & Environmental Science, is based on a bi-functional carbon nitride (K-PHI) photoanode that can both absorb light and store electric charge.

“The solar battery research field is still young and as such very diverse in concepts a...

The cold blast of an air conditioner can be a welcome relief as temperatures soar, but “A/C” units require large amounts of energy and can leak potent greenhouse gases. Today, scientists report an eco-friendly alternative — a plant-based film that gets cooler when exposed to sunlight and comes in a variety of textures and bright, iridescent colors. The material could someday keep buildings, cars and other structures cool without requiring external power.

The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“To make materials that remain cooler than the air around them during the day, you need something that reflects a lot of solar light and doesn’t absorb it, which would transform energy from the light into heat,” says Silvia V...

A big step toward the development of dyes with long-wavelength near-infrared absorption. A research group has discovered that near-infrared absorbing dyes, which had previously been considered to have closed-shell electronic structures, have an intermediate electronic structure, between closed- and open-shell structures. They also found that as the wavelength of near-infrared light that can be absorbed becomes longer the contribution of open-shell forms increases within the dye. These newly discovered characteristics are expected to be utilized to develop new near-infrared absorbing dyes that can absorb longer wavelength near-infrared light.

Near-infrared light, whose wavelength is longer than visible light, is invisible and can pass through many substances...

Micron-sized “bow ties,” self-assembled from nanoparticles, form a variety of different curling shapes that can be precisely controlled, a research team led by the University of Michigan has shown.

The development opens the way for easily producing materials that interact with twisted light, providing new tools for machine vision and producing medicines.

While biology is full of twisted structures like DNA, known as chiral structures, the degree of twist is locked in—trying to change it breaks the structure...