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Solar design triumphs through thick and thin

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Marie Freebody, Contributing Editor, [email protected]

The quest for high power-conversion efficiency in most thin-film solar cells has often been hindered by the “thick and thin” challenge, in which a cell must be thick enough to collect a sufficient amount of light, yet thin enough to extract current. Now a novel solar cell devised by physicists at Boston College in Chestnut Hill and inspired by the coaxial cable resolves this dilemma by being both optically thick and electrically thin. This is an electron microscope image of a nanocoax solar cell array comprising 2-μm-tall metal nanopillars conformally coated with 100 nm of...Read full article

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    Published: September 2010
    Glossary
    coaxial cable
    A type of cable made up of two conductors; one conductor is inside of and concentric with the other.
    nano
    An SI prefix meaning one billionth (10-9). Nano can also be used to indicate the study of atoms, molecules and other structures and particles on the nanometer scale. Nano-optics (also referred to as nanophotonics), for example, is the study of how light and light-matter interactions behave on the nanometer scale. See nanophotonics.
    thin film
    A thin layer of a substance deposited on an insulating base in a vacuum by a microelectronic process. Thin films are most commonly used for antireflection, achromatic beamsplitters, color filters, narrow passband filters, semitransparent mirrors, heat control filters, high reflectivity mirrors, polarizers and reflection filters.
    amorphous siliconBoston Collegecoaxial cableenergyEPFLGreenLightJakub RybczynskiKrzysztof KempaMarie Freebody.Michael NaughtonMicroscopynanonanocoaxNational Renewable Energy LaboratoryNaughtonNeuchatel Institute of MicroengineeringPhysica Status Solidisolar cellsSolasta Inc.thick and thin challengethin filmZhifeng Ren

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