Study Discovers How Energy is Lost During Singlet Fission in Solar Cells
Written by AZoMMar 11 2021
Solar energy is considered one of the most significant eco-friendly and fossil-free sustainable sources of electricity. The existing silicon-based solar cells use only around 33% of the energy in sunlight and transform it into electricity.
View from the inside of the magneto-optic instrument which helps Yuttapoom Puttisong and his team to develop a protocol in searching for energy loss in singlet fission. Image Credit: Thor Balkhed.
The reason is the packets of light, or photons, present in the sun’s beams possess energy that is either too little to be absorbed by the solar cell, or too high, such that part of the energy is released as waste heat. This optimum theoretical efficiency is called the Shockley-Queisser limit.
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IMAGE: A visualization of the Glashow event recorded by the IceCube detector. Each colored circle shows an IceCube sensor that was triggered by the event; red circles indicate sensors triggered earlier. view more
Credit: IceCube Collaboration
On December 6, 2016, a high-energy particle called an electron antineutrino hurtled to Earth from outer space at close to the speed of light carrying 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) of energy. Deep inside the ice sheet at the South Pole, it smashed into an electron and produced a particle that quickly decayed into a shower of secondary particles. The interaction was captured by a massive telescope buried in the Antarctic glacier, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
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New IceCube detection proves 60-year-old theory
On December 8, 2016, a high-energy particle called an electron antineutrino was hurtling through space at nearly the speed of light. Normally, the ghostly particle would zip right through the Earth as if it weren’t even there.
But this particle just so happened to smash into an electron deep inside the South Pole’s glacial ice. The collision created a new particle, known as the W
– boson. That boson quickly decayed, creating a shower of secondary particles.
The whole thing played out in front of the watchful detectors of a massive telescope buried in the Antarctic ice, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. This enabled IceCube to make the first ever detection of a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted 60 years ago by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow.