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."

Comments

Oh noes

[Linker3000]

...and frikkin sharks who can fire round corners.

I wonder...

[Finallyjoined!!!]

If we'll finally get real X-Ray Specs now that would be a good use....

Re:I wonder...

[codeButcher]

My dentist uses digital x-rays: a digital pickup in your mouth, zap, picture on the computer. Allegedly uses a lower dose of rays by a factor of 10, no recurring costs for the film, and his computer system includes some image processing capability.

During a recent stay in a hospital, a radiologist I spoke to claimed that most x-rays/sonars are transferred digitally and he often works from home, analysing stuff sent to him from various hospitals.

On the other hand, the MRI I had taken was still transferred to film to be taken to the surgeon.

Re:I wonder...

[codeButcher]

I'm still holding out for 1-way glass/mirrors that actually WORK AS EXPECTED.

An ex-gf's father, who is an architect, told me about this super-modern house in the town where he studied that was clad with one-way mirrors. However, after dark, the inside lights would turn them quite see-through. Favourite hang-out for students was by the bedroom wall, no x-ray glasses needed.

Re:I wonder...

[khayman80]

I'm still holding out for 1-way glass/mirrors that actually WORK AS EXPECTED. An ex-gf's father, who is an architect, told me about this super-modern house in the town where he studied that was clad with one-way mirrors. However, after dark, the inside lights would turn them quite see-through. Favourite hang-out for students was by the bedroom wall, no x-ray glasses needed.

I said something similar to my undergrad physics advisor while working in experimental optics. He said that "true" one-way glass would probably break the laws of thermodynamics. Imagine a box filled with light, and split it in half with a pane of one-way glass. One side would become dark and the other would become twice as bright. It would have to act like Maxwell's demon, which isn't physically possible without energy input.

All "one-way mirrors" in the world are actually just windows with partial mirroring in both directions. The "one-way" part is determined entirely by which side has brighter ambient light. That's why interrogation rooms have bright lights, whereas the viewing room for cops and witnesses is usually very dimly lit.

Yeah, right.

[notgm]

I'll believe it when I don't see it.

I'm just

[Dunbal]

Wondering about the time to market in the solar industry, because for the past 2 years I have been reading all about revolutionary new solar cell techniques, from baking your own solar cells in the oven for well under $1/Watt, to solar cells stacked in 3D that increase efficiency to 80%, to dies that help normal solar cells absorb light better, to flexible solar cells that could cover any surface, to special plastics that concentrate light onto solar cells. But you know what? Not a single solar cell on the market today includes these concepts.

IMO the "cheap, efficient solar cell" will arrive just after the flying car. And the market is certainly resisting current $4-$5/watt retail prices.

Re:I'm just

[bill_kress]

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.

Re:more of this?

[s122604]

And in the late 1800s it was proposed that we would soon have to shut down the patent office, because everything would soon be invented.

Somehow, I think the issuer of such a proclamation would feel right at home on slashdot

Yes, virtually all of these ideas, prototypes, theories, etc.. won't pan out. But if one idea in a million pans out, that one idea can still end up changing the world in ways unimagined.

So yah, keep up the scoffing cynicism, odds are you will be right 99.99% of the time.

I'd rather think/dream/imagine

Burying the lede

[jfengel]

As usual with "SOLAR CELLS HERE TOMORROW!" stories, the actual important news in the story is buried around paragraph six.

This is not the first time such a material has been developed, but it is the first one that can handle light of any polarity, from any angle. It also works in the blue part of the visible spectrum, making it the first NIM to operate at visible frequencies.

Ah, thank you. As usual, a nice, modestly useful development of moderate interest to those who study materials engineering, and of essentially zero interest to anybody else. (Well, except for us science nerds, who shouldn't have to be sold the fluff, but it's what we get anyway.)

But since press releases attract more attention than journal articles, at least when they promise free power, you put FREE SOLAR ENERGY at the top and actual scientific research gets a paragraph somewhere in the middle.

"could have" = we don't know, but give us money

[gweihir]

I am sick and tired of these "could have tremendous impact bla bla bla" statements. Typically nothing comes out of them in the short term and only tiny improvements to existing solutions in the longer term. Marketing speech sucks and it is time we call it "commercial lies" or maybe with Neil Stephenson "commercial bullshit".

Re:negative index means negative speed of light?

[nickersonm]

Not quite. The v in n=c/v is actually the phase speed of the light wave, which is not necessarily the speed at which the pulse of light propagates. The Wikipedia article on negative-index materials has a good animation showing this: the bright bars are the phase peaks, while the envelope is the light pulse. The entire article is pretty good as an overview, although it doesn't go into much mathematical detail.