Harnessing plasmonics, engineers weld nanowires with light

At the nano level, researchers at Stanford have discovered a new way to weld together meshes of tiny wires. Their work could lead to exciting new electronics and solar applications. To succeed, they called upon plasmonics.

New world record efficiency for thin film silicon solar cells

The Photovoltaics-Laboratory (PV-Lab) of EPFL's Insitute of Microengineering (IMT), founded in 1984 by Prof. Arvind Shah and now headed by Prof. Christophe Ballif, is well known as a pioneer in the development of thin-film ...

Polymer solar cells employing Forster resonance energy transfer

Two crucial tasks exist for realizing high-efficiency polymer solar cells: increasing the range of the spectral absorption of light and efficiently harvesting photo-generated excitons. In this work, Förster resonance energy ...

New solar-cell design based on dots and wires

Using exotic particles called quantum dots as the basis for a photovoltaic cell is not a new idea, but attempts to make such devices have not yet achieved sufficiently high efficiency in converting sunlight to power. A new ...

How to produce flexible CIGS solar cells with record efficiency

High-performance flexible and lightweight solar cells, say, on plastic foils, have excellent potential to lower the manufacturing costs through roll-to-roll processing and the so called "balance-of-system" cost, thus enabling ...

Solar Cell Researcher Explores Nanotech Ideas

(PhysOrg.com) -- A UT Dallas researcher envisions a time soon when plastic sheets of solar cells are inexpensively stamped out in factories and then affixed to cell phones, laptops and other power-hungry mobile devices. And ...

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