That's fscking awesome! I certainly hope it turns out as good as you make it sound. Even if it only increases the average panel to 30% efficiency, that's many gigawatts over a year's production.

absorption is only part of the problem of how to create energy.

the material has to absorb the energy and excite electrons to a point where they jump over a gap, which leads to an electric current.

if the material absorbs the energy and converts it to another form of energy like heat or large numbers of slightly excited electrons, nothing useful will be accomplished.

This was discovered nearly a decade ago.

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/12.09/silicon.html

Well done the oil lobby for keeping it unfunded for so long. Don't expect to see black silicon solar cells any time soon, they might actually work and produce power cleanly and efficiently at reasonable cost.

This discovery will change the world of solar power, digital photography, etc. Can't wait for a DSLR with black silicon CMOS chip in it.

Sounds like a ton of energy to create. Waiting to see net gain over time. Hope it blows us out of the water.

Real solar cells already use an antireflective coating that is very efficient. Absorption values are already quite a bit better than "black silicon" also texturing of the surface is standard practice. Therefore it is not likely that this innovation would make any significant improvement in current cell efficiency numbers.

Big problem here gang. Global Warming Potential in carbon equivalents for Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is 22800: e.g. SF6 is way worse than C02 for the climate. Plus it is very energy intensive to manufacture.

I'd have to see third party verified life cycle inventory comparison before I'd conclude that this treatment even moves the SPV productivity ahead a notch.

That's a good point John, though there's a good chance that they're using an extremely small quantity of it and that a lot of it can be resused. Net global warming effect would still be better with better solar panels..

The SF6 gas is used to dope the Si with S, so while it goes in as SF6, it doesn't come out as SF6.

and Peter: wtf? oil lobby keeping this unfunded? did you just completely make that up?

Those guys have really nice labcoats.

Just add titanium and vanadium to the Si mix and you've got a winner.

Still, why is the article nearly 9 years old? I am getting very bored with everybody thinking up an idea and without verification or testresults just throwing it on internet. I say this is starting to be green pollution.
Results please. After all, they do have a research facility at Harvard??????

Bringing a technology to market takes time. especially since 10 years ago energy cost a lot less.. but now, the news is that harvard is licensing its patents to SiOnyx. That's great! Stuff will start to happen.

I spent this summer at Harvard working in the lab of Professor Mazur, whose group started the work on black silicon and spawned SiOnyx (although I was not involved at all with the black silicon project).

Developing a new technology always takes a long time, so being a decade old shouldn't discourage anyone. If you look at the NY Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/12stream.html), you'll see that producing black silicon already costs about the same as other semiconductor manufacturing, even though it is still a new technology. Also, notice that they say the first applications are likely to be for night vision and light detection, rather than PV.

If you want more info about silicon, you can try the Mazur group's website, http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/research/detailspage.php?rowid=1

Why not license it to Chartered or TSMC or someone with existing manufacturing capacity, instead of YET ANOTHER STARTUP?

All these new technologies are wonderful but we really don't have five years at this to wait - we need these things to be available NOW.

Even the best Multi Junction solar panels can only use a small section of visible light to knock electrons from the valence band to the conduction band. What does that mean? You have to dope silicon with 3 different materials (Indium gallium arsenide) and each layer supports a smaller subsection of the visible spectrum. So you are creating a very expensive layer cake to grab that spectrum. Black Silicon is capable utilizing a much larger portion of the visible spectrum as well as infrared to knock those same electrons into the conduction band. All of this in ONE layer. So less silicon to grab more spectrum and produce electricity. I can't gush enough about this stuff.

It's always interesting to read the latest development in solar technology!

I just hope we see some mass introduction into the market soon!

As Scott explained, this doesn't have nearly the impact that you might think it would on solar cells. If you go to the research group's web page, you'll see that the applications they are looking at are not primarily solar cells, because it has clear benefits in other places, less so in solar cells. Linked from my name is the download page for the most recent PhD thesis from the group. The last chapter is on solar cells. The introduction to that chapter analyzes the possible improvement and says that it wouldn't improve crystalline or polycrystalline silicon solar cells, but that it might improve thin-film silicon solar cells a little bit: "Although the greater density of defects in [black silicon] will result in most of this absorption being lost to recombination in traps, even an increase in eciency of thin film silicon solar cells of just several % would have a large impact on the photovoltaic industry."

He's right--that could be worthwhile, but we're talking about an incremental gain in thin-film performance, with the result still be lower performance than standard Si solar cells, and there's a lot more work needed to realize that hypothetical gain. And the process might be expensive enough that the cost advantage of thin-film would be lost.

This is a good thing to be researching, and it might eventually provide a few percent benefit, but don't hold your breath waiting for a revolution in solar energy, or waste your breath on conspiracy theories about why we don't have 500% efficiency solar cells already.

Also, if you read the NYT article, or look at the company web site, you see that they make no claims about PV applications--it's all about making sensors. That's consistent with the research results, that show it doesn't really have much application to PV. The idea that this has a big benefit for PV is all in Treehugger's imagination.