Physicists at Rutgers University have discovered that energy-carrying particles generated by packets of light can travel on the order of a thousand times farther in organic (carbon-based) semiconductors than scientists previously observed. This boosts scientists’ hopes that less expensive plastic solar cells based on this budding technology may one day overtake silicon solar cells in… »

Developed by Kyosemi Corporation, Sphelar solar cell takes on a spherical shape, which makes it capable of power generation with greater efficiency and flexible applications. These spherical cells were shown at the recent PV Expo 2010 in Tokyo, where they demonstrated how the windows in buildings might be used to collect solar power in the… »

The discovery that butterfly wings have scales that act as tiny solar collectors has led scientists in China and Japan to design a more efficient solar cell that could be used for powering homes, businesses, and other applications in the future. The researchers turned to the microscopic solar scales on butterfly wings in their search… »

Organic photovoltaics, which rely on organic molecules to capture sunlight and convert it into electricity, are a hot research area because in principle they have significant advantages over traditional rigid silicon cells. Organic photovoltaics start out as a kind of ink that can be applied to flexible surfaces to create solar cell modules that can… »