Group items tagged

"we report the high-pressure, high-temperature synthesis of a diamond aerogel from an amorphous carbon aerogel precursor using a laser-heated diamond anvil cell"

so what ...?

Depending on its properties it might be interesting as an ablative heat shield material.

graphene for solar cells ... who wants to have a closer look at it?

Why not but I'm not sure I have the competences/background to do much...

A startup with a secret recipe for printing cheap solar cells on aluminum foil debuted today, in what could end up a milestone.

fantastic!!!

Single celled organisms may not be able to think, but they can act in remarkable ways

Nonradiative resonant energy transfer in optimized QD-QW systems may provide a solar energy conversion approach with a viable tradeoff with the bottlenecks of charge carrier generation and/or transport to/in electrodes faced by excitonic solar cells.

May be interesting for the Tallha proposal of grabbing solar cells with thin wires to avoid the common illumination reduction by the contacts.

n some semiconducting nanocrystals one photon can release two or three electrons, hence the term avalanche effect. This could theoretically lead to a maximum output of 44 percent in a solar cell comprising the correct semiconducting nanocrystals.

remember that I wanted to do this at a University lab course! ...LS

Unicellular organisms learn. How they do is written in the paper somewhere.

A lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

could not find any decent paper on this results, but they would be fantastic of course .... though am a bit sceptic

ok found one: doi:10.1038/nmat2635

old idea with some new twists

Researchers have created a new material that can produce three or more free electrons every time it absorbs a single photon. This is unlike conventional semiconductors, which produce just one free electron per photon. Based on tiny semiconductor structures called quantum dots, the new material - developed by researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Toyota Europe in Belgium - could someday be used to make more efficient solar cells.

Scientists have discovered how algae that survive in very low levels of light are able to switch on and off a weird quantum phenomenon that occurs during photosynthesis. The function in the algae of this quantum effect, known as coherence, remains a mystery, but it is thought it could help them harvest energy from the sun much more efficiently. Working out its role in a living organism could lead to advances such as better organic solar cells.

very very nice! we tried already a few years back to find an angle to see how we could study quantum phenomena occuring in plants and photosynthsis is one of the great examples since somehow plants manage to make the phenomena work for them at elevated temperatures, a feat in itself ... any good idea most welcome!!!

Anna maybe? Joe?