A new application for tiny “nanowire” filaments could herald a new wave of more efficient solar cells, Science Daily reports. The new cells have been described as “hairy” due to the the appearance of thousands of the tiny filaments under a microscope, but in actual fact each nanowire is only a couple of microns thick - a thousand times narrower than a human hair.
The nanowires work by completing a circuit between the solar cell’s collecting surface and the rest of the cell, allowing greatly improved conduction of energy in to the system. The technology is in it’s early days but with teams from Harvard, UC San Diego, the University of Gottingen and the University of Bremen all working on applications it can’t be too long before we see the first nanowire solar cell brought to market.
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