Category Technology/Electronics

This is a Perovskite solar cell prototype. Credit: Copyright Alain Herzog / EPFL

EPFL researchers are pushing the limits of perovskite solar cell performance by exploring the best way to grow these crystals. Michael Graetzel and his team found that, by briefly reducing the pressure while fabricating perovskite crystals, they were able to achieve the highest performance ever measured for larger-size perovskite solar cells, reaching over 20% efficiency and matching the performance of conventional thin-film solar cells of similar sizes.
This is promising news for perovskite technology that is already low cost and under industrial development.

However, high performance in pervoskites does not necessarily herald the doom of silicon-based solar technology...

The Solar Impulse 2 aircraft flies over the Statue of Liberty before landing at JFK airport June 11, 2016 in New York

The Solar Impulse 2 aircraft has ended its US portion of its bid to circle the globe using only solar power. “It’s absolutely incredible,” Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg said. “It’s a dream here.” The light, slow-moving aircraft later landed at New York’s Kennedy Airport, completing the 5h flight from Lehigh Valley Airport in Pennsylvania, 1 minute ahead of schedule at 3:59 am (0759 GMT).

It was the 14th leg of an east-west journey that began March 9, 2015 in Abu Dhabi, and has taken the aircraft across Asia and the Pacific to the US. From NY the Solar Impulse team will attempt to cross the Atlantic to Europe and on to the Middle East...

Masdar Institute postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Jin You Lu, characterizes the nanoporous solar absorber with UV-Vis-NIR spectroscopy. Credit: Tahra Al Hammadi, Masdar Institute News

“Our research team has developed a simple and cost-effective fabrication technique to create solar absorbers that can harness a greater share of the solar spectrum, thus increasing their efficiencies, while also maintaining low emission levels,” said Masdar Institute’s Dr. TieJun Zhang, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.

Dr. Nicholas X...

Plexcitons travel for 20,000 nanometers, a length which is on the order of the width of human hair. Graphic by Joel Yuen-Zhou

Scientists at UC SD, MIT and HarvardU have engineered “topological plexcitons,” energy-carrying particles that could help make possible the design of new kinds of solar cells and miniaturized optical circuitry. Within the Lilliputian world of solid state physics, light and matter interact in strange ways, exchanging energy back and forth between them.

“When light and matter interact, they exchange energy,” explained Assistant/Prof. Joel Yuen-Zhou. “Energy can flow back and forth between light in a metal (so called plasmon) and light in a molecule (so called exciton)...