Silicon Gets an Assist

Credit: Lorenzo Mangolini and Ming Lee

Solar panels, supercomputers and semiconductors all rely on silicon, a material that, for all its wonders, has limitations when it comes to converting light into electricity. Silicon can efficiently convert red light into electricity, but with blue light, silicon loses most of the energy as heat. Researchers have long hypothesized that the way around this inefficiency is to pair silicon with an organic material that converts blue photons into pairs of red photons, essentially getting silicon out of the business of inefficient blue-light conversion.

A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and University of California, Riverside have taken a big step closer to that goal by linking silicon and a carbon-based material with tiny chemical wires and demonstrating for the first time the transfer of energy between the two materials. According to UT Austin associate professor of chemistry Sean Roberts, whose lab led much of the research, this could help make solar panels, most of which use silicon, more efficient.

The team has already demonstrated the transfer of energy from silicon to anthracene, basically soot. And they are developing another carbon-based material that they believe can transfer energy to silicon, essentially the reverse process.

“In addition to their use for solar energy, these materials may be useful in driving high energy chemical reactions using low energy photons since they can pool their energy together,” said Roberts. “Other researchers have shown that this approach can work and is useful in using light to drive chemistry in hard to get to environments, like biological settings.”