Breaking open the AI black box, team finds key chemistry for solar energy and beyond

Screening process for new chemical candidates becomes dramatically simpler than blindly searching around chemical space

10-Sep-2024 - Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for researchers, but with a significant limitation: The inability to explain how it came to its decisions, a problem known as the “AI black box.” By combining AI with automated chemical synthesis and experimental validation, an interdisciplinary team of ...

Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient

Researchers use substrates of metal and dielectrics to boost the light conversion efficiency of perovskites by 250 percent

22-Feb-2023 - Silicon, the standard semiconducting material used in a host of applications—computer central processing units (CPUs), semiconductor chips, detectors, and solar cells—is an abundant, naturally occurring material. However, it is expensive to mine and to purify. Perovskites—a family of materials ...

A sunny outlook for solar

New research demonstrates great promise of all-inorganic perovskite solar cells for improving the efficiencies of solar cells

18-Oct-2021 - Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites have already demonstrated very high photovoltaic efficiencies of greater than 25%. The prevailing wisdom in the field is that the organic (carbon- and hydrogen-containing) molecules in the material are crucial to achieving this impressive performance because ...

New discovery settles long-standing debate about photovoltaic materials

21-Apr-2020 - Scientists have theorized that organometallic halide perovskites - a class of light harvesting "wonder" materials for applications in solar cells and quantum electronics - are so promising due to an unseen yet highly controversial mechanism called the Rashba effect. Scientists at the U.S. ...

Caffeine gives solar cells an energy boost

The idea began as a joke over morning coffee

29-Apr-2019 - Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Solargiga Energy in China have discovered that caffeine can help make a promising alternative to traditional solar cells more efficient at converting light to electricity. Their research may enable this cost-effective renewable ...

Self-assembling nanomaterial a pathway to more efficient, affordable harnessing of solar power

Singlet fission reaction creates more and extends the life of electronic charges

28-Jan-2019 - Solar rays are a plentiful, clean source of energy that is becoming increasingly important as the world works to shift away from power sources that contribute to global warming. But current methods of harvesting solar charges are expensive and inefficient--with a theoretical efficiency limit of ...

Novel materials convert visible into infrared light

Penetrate of living tissue and other materials without damage by high-intensity light exposure

18-Jan-2019 - Columbia University scientists, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard, have succeeded in developing a chemical process to convert visible light into infrared energy, allowing innocuous radiation to penetrate living tissue and other materials without the damage caused by high-intensity ...

Watching atoms move in hybrid perovskite crystals reveals clues to improving solar cells

23-Nov-2017 - A team of researchers led by the University of California San Diego has for the first time observed nanoscale changes deep inside hybrid perovskite crystals that could offer new insights into developing low-cost, high-efficiency solar cells. Using X-ray beams and lasers, researchers studied how a ...

Four elements make 2-D optical platform

27-Sep-2017 - Rice University scientists have discovered a two-dimensional alloy with an optical bandgap that can be tuned by the temperature used to grow it. The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan grew the four-component alloy of transition metals molybdenum and tungsten with chalcogens sulfur ...

Insect eyes inspire new solar cell design from Stanford

04-Sep-2017 - Packing tiny solar cells together, like micro-lenses in the compound eye of an insect, could pave the way to a new generation of advanced photovoltaics, say Stanford University scientists. In a new study, the Stanford team used the insect-inspired design to protect a fragile photovoltaic material ...