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Researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada and KAUST in Saudi Arabia have made a solar cell out of colloidal quantum dot (CQD) films that has a record-breaking efficiency of 7%. This is almost 40% more efficient than the best previous devices based on CQDs.

Earth is a pale blue dot when viewed from space. Now astrobiologists have worked out the likely colours of Earth-like planets orbiting other stars

A new more efficient type of single photon light source consisting of a quantum dot reproduces 1954 Robert Dicke theoretical proposal. Applications in quantum communications directly on the target. "All light sources work by absorbing energy - for example, from an electric current - and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat."

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.

Earth, as seen from Saturn...

Quote: "This is exactly what we are pursuing - self-assembling materials that organize at smaller sizes, say, less than 20 or even 10 nanometers"

Direct Self-Assembly (DSA) is one of the competitors for the next-generation 'lithography' together with direct-write via electron beam and the more traditional extreme UV (EUV) lithography. Although there are huge benefits to use DSA, the technology does have some drawbacks when it comes to line edge roughness. It seems however particularly good for repetitive structures that are used in memory chips. As long as EUV is struggling to get it working, DSA definitely has a fighting chance to enter the market one day.

Imagine a material that only admits thermal conduction for certain temperatures. Martin Maldovan from Georgia Tech holds a tiny thermoelectric device that turns cold on one side when current is applied. Recent research has focused on the possibility of using interference effects in phonon waves to control heat transport in materials. These are exciting news (see Nature Materials paper here http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v14/n7/full/nmat4308.html). Heterostructure research lead to outstanding new possibilities when applied to electronic transport (e.g. in quantum well and quantum dots) and to photonics (e.g. Quantum Cascade Laser tunnable lasers). Apparently the time has come to see selective thermal control in this way! Truly exciting!!

Apparently there is a project going on in ESA on this topic led by TEC-EP, the contact person is Evelyne Simon. I really would like to do some research on these topics to see if we can find something interesting that would not have been considered in this study.

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.

Carrier multiplication (CM) is a process in which absorption of a single photon produces not just one but multiple electron-hole pairs. This effect is a potential enabler of next-generation, high-efficiency photovoltaic and photocatalytic systems.

A team led by Robert Wolkow at Canada's National Institute for Nanotechnology in Edmonton, Alberta, has discovered that single silicon atoms, sitting in an electron-doped silicon lattice that is blanketed with hydrogen, provide electronic structures with