Russian nuclear scientists have devised a storage battery that can convert both solar energy and the energy of stars into electricity, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.

"This unique battery, which has no analogues in the world, can operate for 24 hours a day. Researchers have succeeded in creating a new substance - a heteroelectric - due to which the battery down here on Earth can be powered by the energy of the sun and stars irrespective of weather conditions," said Valentin Samoilov, the director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna.

According to Samoilov, they have proved the efficiency of the new substance both in darkness and in cloudy conditions - the stellar energy battery is more efficient than the conventional solar-cell battery by several folds. "The demonstration specimen manifested more than twice as high efficiency in the visible-light spectrum and a 50 percent higher efficiency in the infrared portion of the spectrum," he explained. "The prime cost of the heteroelectric photocell is lower than that of the photoconductive element of the conventional solar-cell battery."

The "fundamentally new substance", called heteroelectric, consists of a combination between an organic carrier substance and a certain amount of metallic nanoparticles. This way, scientists managed to change the properties of the carrier substance. They claim that heteroelectric materials can reach an efficiency of 90% conversion from solar energy (or light in general) to electricity. The solar panels used today have an efficiency of only 12-18 percent.

The same technology could have a number of different applications. Certain types of glasses made on heteroelectric technology allow light to pass in a certain specified spectral interval and absorb it outside the given interval - in other words they are ideal filters. This could be used to develop various optical devices, optical computers and lasers and could open new opportunities for holography.