Era of affordable and efficient solar panels is not far away

          Efficiency of solar cell refers to the portion of energy in the form of sunlight that can be converted into electricity via photovoltaics by the solar cell. Silicon based solar cells, by far is the most common material in the residential solar market today. If a solar panel has 20% efficiency that means it’s capable of converting 20% of the sunlight hitting it into the electricity. The highest efficiency solar panels can reach almost 23% efficiency. But the average efficiency of solar panels falls between 15 to 18% efficiency range.

        The average efficiency of solar panels is lower than the maximum efficiency. But if you raise the overall efficiency, you don’t have to install as many panels to get the same amount of power.

What will improves efficiency is to put another solar cell on top of an existing one?

       Researchers took a PEROVSKITE SOLAR CELL, a crystal that’s designed to harvest photons of high energy. It is layered on the top of a silicon solar cell, which captures more photons in the infrared part of the spectrum. This layering increases the efficiency of 21% of silicon cell to an efficiency 27%. Researchers started fewer than 10 years ago with the concept using less expensive materials on top of the silicon, and at the first only achieved about 13% efficiency. But through improvements they have been able to improve this number.

      Researchers in it, used three main things- halide alloy of chlorine, bromine and iodine. There is a ideal band gap in the solar cells. Bromine can raise this bandgap but when iodine is used and exposed to light then these elements don’t stay in place. Using different amounts of bromine, chlorine and iodine, the researchers figured out a way to shrink the crystal structure and more chlorine to fit in perovskite and stabilise it.

Perovskites are inexpensive and easy to create in labs. This means that it now costs more to install the cells than to buy them.  With solar power market growing around 30% per year, efficiency, cost and longevity are major considerations. Researchers believe that it can take them to 30% efficiency soon and they are very optimistic about it. 

What is the mystery of Ghost like particles?

Ghosts are something that we could not see or detect them. Similarly there are some particles around us which could not be properly detected by us. The name of these Ghost like particles are NEUTRINOS. 

Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles of the universe. They were born around 15 billions years ago, soon after the birth of universe. Neutrino is the most spread particle in the universe after photon. It has no mass. But today they are believed to have mass but  exceedingly small, only a tiny fraction of the mass of the proton.

Scientists believe that tons of neutrinos were created during Big Bang. Neutrinos are produced in readioactive decay, supernovas, nuclear reactions, nuclear reactors and cosmic rays hits earth. Neutrinos are everywhere. Every second trillions of neutrinos are passing through our body. “Wherever there is nuclear physics, there are neutrinos” says Francis Halzen. Although they are hard to detect, these little particles can tell us about everything from the birth of the universe to the nuclear reactions that power our cities. Flux of neutrinos coming from sun is approximately 1011  neutrinos passing through 1cm2 in 1sec. All neutrinos are super light. They move close to speed of light. Neutrinos are known for their ability to propagate over considerable distances through solid matter almost unaffected. Weakly interacts with the environment and a useful tool for interdisciplinary studies of large objects like sun, earth and stars.

Neutrinos could not be easily detected which makes it difficult to know its properties. But if one neutrino out of trillion can be detected then it can gives the entire information of its source from where it has been coming. There is no loss of information through these particles because it doen not interact with anything. That's why such particles can have various applications.

Neutrinos have a potential to do amazing things like speed up global communication, detect the presence of nuclear weapons and confirm the presence of dark matter.