Chemists have proposed a way to double the efficiency of solar panels

A new ultra-thin material could potentially significantly improve the efficiency of solar panels.Colorado State University reports.

Most modern solar panels are made from silicon semiconductors.They have a significant “innate” disadvantage - approximately at least 40% of the light falling on them turns into heat and does not participate in the generation of electricity.

A group of scientists led by Rachel Austin proposed creating solar cells based not on silicon, but on molybdenum disulfide, its close analogue.They got the idea from experiments with an ultrafast transient absorption spectrometer, which can very accurately measure the successive energy states of individual electrons as they are excited by a laser pulse.Experiments using this instrument can provide "photographs" of how charges flow in a system.The authors created a photoelectrochemical cell using single-layer molybdenum disulfide, then excited electrons with a laser and monitored their movement through the material.

It turned out that this material converts light into energy extremely efficiently.In addition, they were able to find out exactly why this happens.

This is because its crystalline structure allows it to extract and harness the energy of so-called hot electrons, which are high-energy electrons briefly excited from their ground state when colliding with visible light.In the new photoelectrochemical cell, the energy from these hot electrons was immediately converted into current rather than lost as heat.The observed phenomenon of hot electron “recycling” is absent in conventional silicon solar cells.

The authors hope that in the future, based on this technology, it will be possible to create efficient photovoltaic panels with an efficiency twice as high as modern ones.

Source: https://www.gazeta.ru/science/news/2023/04/18/20241775.shtml