increased efficiency of pv

 http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/news/releases/archive/04-040.shtml
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  QUOTE

"Although the Los Alamos scientists have not yet built a working PbSe
nanocrystal solar cell, they are the first to demonstrate the ability to use
impact ionization to generate more excitons and hence a greater electrical
current in the solar cell configuration"



I smell press-release for funding $$$ for Los Alamos

They also state it's been around since the 50's .... so in 50 years they
have done exactly what ? , the press release doesn't make clear reference to
any "test" and the link to the folks doing the actual research has no
further information (I guess one could call the staff , all the phone
numbers are listed for the technical staff)

With PV cells , there have been many "breakthroughs" to improve efficiencies
, but when the theory's are attempted to be applied to the physic's of
making cells it almost never makes it beyond this step

The only "true" new technology IMHO is the Sanyo HIT process , they hold all
the records for real - in production efficiencies and the panels are priced
accordingly

By the way , it took Sanyo 20 years to that right :)

 On Fri, 7 May 2004 11:39:30 -0400, "Solar Guppy"


I just glanced over the article in Physical Review Letters. What they
are claiming is a 35% increase in the theoretical maximum efficiency of
a single-junction solar cell. However, they also talk about excitons and
electron-hole pairs as if they are the same thing, and they are not. An
exciton consists of an electron and a hole that are electrostatically
bound, and as I understand it they have to be separated from one another
(i.e., converted into an electron-hole pair) before they can contribute
to current flow. In silicon, thermal energy at room temperature is
enough to accomplish this, but in a molecular semiconductor like PbSe
this might not be the case. In that case, the energy to ionize the
exciton must come from somewhere else, and they don't address that in
their article. But then, it isn't clear from the article whether they're
truly talking about excitons or actually mean electron-hole pairs. There
is one point where they *must* be talking about electron-hole pairs, but
refer to excitons instead....

At any rate, the work is mostly theoretical at this point. If they're
going to make a solar cell of out of PbSe, they have a long road ahead
of them. After that they might be able to prove that this mechanism
actually does increase efficiency.