Percy Gonzalo Sifuentes-Samanamud

New Capabilities

First author of the JACS paper

Every conventional solar cell on Earth runs into the same wall: a single photon of sunlight can knock loose, at most, one electron. That constraint, formalized in 1961, caps the efficiency of standard silicon panels at roughly 33%. A team from Kyushu University and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz has now demonstrated a molecular system that coaxes 1.3 useful energy carriers out of each absorbed photon—a 130% quantum yield—by splitting one photon's energy into two carriers through a quantum process called singlet fission and catching them with a specially designed molybdenum-based emitter.

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