New Transparent Material Can Absorb Light Efficiently

A new type of transparent material has been produced in the United States, by a team of investigators at two national laboratories. The experts say that the thin films could conceivably be used to underlie the development of transparent solar panel technology.

The thing about these thin films is that they are perfectly capable of absorbing a lot of sunlight over a large area. They then convert the energy of the elementary particles making up light, called photons, into electricity.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) worked together to create this advanced material.

“Potentially, with future refinement of this technology, windows in a home or office could generate solar power,” says LANL Chemistry Division researcher Hsing-Lin Wang.

The expert is a co-corresponding author of a new research paper describing the material, which is published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Chemistry of Materials.

The basis of the thin films is made up of a semiconducting polymer, on top of which the researchers placed spherical, cage-like carbon compounds called fullerenes, which are comprised of precisely 60 carbon atoms each.

Experts at the two labs explain that placing the fullerenes carefully on the polymer triggers a self-assembly reaction. The carbon compounds arrange themselves into repeating pattern of micron-sized, hexagonal-shaped cells that look like the structure of graphene.

“Though such honeycomb-patterned thin films have previously been made using conventional polymers like polystyrene, this is the first report of such a material that blends semiconductors and fullerenes to absorb light and efficiently generate charge and charge separation,” adds Mircea Cotlet.

He was the lead scientist on the new investigation, and the expert holds an appointment as a physical chemist at the BNL Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN).

One of the things that are really important about the new achievement is that the processes used to create the thin films are scalable and cost-effective, which means that they could make their way into relevant industries fairly soon.

The new research effort was conducted using grant money secured from the DOE Office of Science, Science Blog reports.