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New Metamaterial Means More Efficient Solar Cells
ElectricSteve writes "Metamaterials are man-made substances designed to do some very weird things that natural materials don't. The path of a beam of light through a natural material like glass is predictable, but scientists from the California Institute of Technology have engineered an optical material that bends light in the wrong direction. This new negative-index metamaterial (NIM) could have several valuable uses including invisibility cloaking, superlensing (imaging nano-scale objects using visible light), and improved light collection in solar cells."
Solar has a SERIOUS problem that makes it completely resistant to corporate investment... It's that it is virtually impossible to monopolize the market.
What would you invest in if you were a corporation only interested in your own profits, solar panels that everyone could buy once and put on their roofs for 10 years or a nuclear reactor where you can sell electricity every day of the year at an ever increasing cost? If you picked solar, you've just been fired by the shareholders!
Although solar is picking up steams, the steps are slower. there is investment in research, research, experimentation, revision, testing, production, mass production--all of which are required to reach "affordable product" (Pulled that out of the air, but I hope you get what I mean)
Anyway, when you have someone funding that entire cycle at all stages, it moves orders of magnitude faster.
Actually a corporation might even be better off manipulating the darker/less public parts of a government to hamper solar production--not that anyone would do such a thing.