A team of experts from the University of Chicago and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has recently announced the development of a new type of material, an electronic glue that is able to bind nanocrystals together, and that also helps them pass electrical charge from one to the other. The find could have important applications in forwarding the field of semiconductor construction, as well as in solar panel technology. Finally, the costs of efficient solar arrays will be brought down to affordable levels.

Large semiconductor crystals are present in a large variety of daily objects, including computer chips and solar cells, but their efficiency is outweighed by their costs. Inserting such large crystals makes the cost of the overall device incorporating them prohibitively large, so researchers have been looking for an alternative for a long time. One possible solution, they inferred, would be to use nanocrystals, but their operation is hampered by the fact that they cannot transfer their charge from one to the other, on account of surface ligands, which are organic molecules on top of them.

Despite the fact that they are only a few hundred atoms large, the nanocrystals have thus far remained inaccessible to large-scale applications, on account of the ligands. However, the new research, which is detailed in the latest issue of the journal Science, has yielded a new technique of manufacturing them, which could open up these devices for nanocrystals. The new glue, developed at the University of Chicago, in expert Dmitri Talapin's laboratory, has the ability to assist the nanoscale crystals in efficiently transmitting their charges.

Once the new electronic glue is inserted in the nanocrystal manufacturing process, the need for the organic insulating molecules will disappear, and they will be replaced by the new stuff. When that happens, Talapin says, their ability to couple with each other and produce charge increases considerably, which means that they could soon become readily available in cheap solar panels, and better computer microprocessors.