In October of 2009, a scientific breakthrough was announced that could clear the way to more efficient and more powerful solar collection cells. University of Florida chemists announced that they had figured out a method for drawing forth promising molecular structures that can be used in capturing. These synthetic molecules are known asdendrimers. True to their name, they have many branching units which allow them to be make highly effective good energy absorbers. The amount of energy that they can amass and transfer is dependent upon which path energy takes as it is moving through the molecule. Phased tailored laser pulses, the team demonstrated, can be used to coax the energy down different, targeted branches.
Valeria Kleiman, a UF associate professor of chemistry and the principle researcher, said “This gives us a new way of studying light-matter interactions. It enables us to study not just how the molecule reacts, but actually to change how it reacts, so we can test different energy transfer pathways and find the most efficient one…What we see is that we control where the energy goes by encoding different information in the excitation pulses…Imagine you want to go from here to Miami, and the road is blocked somewhere. With this process, we’re able to say, ‘Don’t take that road, follow another one instead.’”

The development of solar energy is here to stay. More energy from the Sun falls upon planet Earth in one single hour than all of the energy that is produced and consumed for electrical power by human beings in one year. If we can efficiently andinexpensively harvest and use solar energy, we will be 48 years ahead of electricity demand in just two days–literally.

So it should come as no surprise that the UF researchers are not alone in their kind of experiments. Zhang Shuguang and research collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently were able to combine a protein complex taken from spinach chloroplasts with organic semiconductors in order to make a solar cell–that’s right, from spinach–which we could enhance with solid state electronics.Shuguang says “Nature has been doing this for billions of years, but this is the first time we’ve been able to harness it.”

As we develop more advanced nanotechnology with ideas like these, we will be able to continuously do something in the area of solar power generation as happens with Moore’s Law in the development and evolution of computer semiconductors: get more out of less, and create thinner and lighter solar panels for less expensive but more efficient electricity generation.