A Polymer Solar Cell with Near-Perfect Internal Efficiency

Description

An international group of scientists has developed a polymer-based solar cell with an ability not yet seen in similar cells: almost every single photon it absorbs is converted into a pair of electric-charge carriers, and every one of those pairs is collected at the cell's electrodes.

The overall efficiency of the cell is six percent, meaning a total of six percent of the absorbed energy is converted into usable electricity when illuminated in the lab with similated solar light. This may seem low, but polymer solar cells to date have not yielded efficiencies better than five percent.

“These characteristics make our polymer solar cell the best of its kind produced so far,” said the study's corresponding scientist, Alan Heeger of the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Heeger Center for Advanced Materials at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, in South Korea.

Original URL

http://www.physorg.com/news164458857.html

http://www.physorg.com/news164458857.html