Splitting Light for Better Solar Panels

May-12-13 By manipulating light on a very small scale, Caltech professor Harry Atwater believes his lab can produce an affordable solar panel able to generate twice the power of current models.

Solar panels today are made up of a single semiconducting material,usually silicon, which can only absorb a narrow band of the spectrum. The team hopes to increase the efficiency of the cells by developing a design that splits sunlight into separate component wavelengths, each producing a different color of light. The light would then be send to a cell made of a semiconductor best able to absorb the specific color.

Atwater’s team currently has three designs in production. One collects sunlight and directs it at a specific angle to the corresponding cell, one uses nanoscale optical filters to filter light from all angles, and one would use a hologram instead of filters to separate the spectrum. Although Atwater is not yet sure which design will prove to be the best, he believes the finished product will be much less complex than many similar devices on the market today.

Image: Odan Jaeger

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