By combining designer quantum dot light-emitters with spectrally matched photonic mirrors, a team of scientists with Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois created solar cells that collect blue photons at 30 times the concentration of conventional solar cells, the highest luminescent concentration factor ever recorded. This breakthrough paves the way for the future development of low-cost solar cells that efficiently utilize the high-energy part of the solar spectrum.
“We’ve achieved a luminescent concentration ratio greater than 30 with an optical efficiency of 82-percent for...
A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) developing a bioinorganic hybrid approach to artificial photosynthesis have achieved another milestone. Having generated quite a buzz with their hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that used electrons to synthesize carbon dioxide into acetate, the team has now developed a hybrid system that produces renewable molecular hydrogen and uses it to synthesize carbon dioxide into methane, the primary constituent of natural gas.
“Science is a dynamic environment so keep in mind when you pick a problem to study that the world can change and you’d better be prepared to change with it.”
Speaking at the 2015 “fall” meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Boston, Berkeley Lab director Paul Alivisatos, an acclaimed pioneer in the quantum dot field, described what he called the “odyssey” of colloidal quantum dot light emitters, starting with their discovery to their applications first in biological labeling, then in display screens for electronic devices.
Burning through a tank of gasoline in a typical automobile releases about 81 kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This adds up to a staggering 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide emission each year from cars alone. Capturing and either sequestering these carbon emissions or converting them into valuable chemical products is one way to combat the effects of global climate change. Highly promising candidates for capturing and containing carbon dioxide and other gases are crystalline extended systems with sponge-like storage capabilities. Two major classes of these systems are metal...
Congressional staff members Meyer Seligman (right) of Senate Appropriations and Emily Domenech (center) of the House Science Committee met with Director Paul Alivisatos and toured BELLA, the ALS, the Molecular Foundry, JCAP, JBEI and FLEXLab. Physics and Nuclear Sciences researchers briefed the two on key experiments and projects.
A team of researchers from Columbia University and Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry has passed a major milestone in molecular electronics with the creation of a single-molecule diode that outperforms the best of its predecessors by a factor of 50.
“Using an ionic solution, two gold electrodes of dramatically different exposed surface areas, and a single symmetric molecule specially designed by the Luis Campos’ group at Columbia, we were able to create a diode that resulted in a rectification ratio, the ratio of forward to...
The term “plasmons” might sound like something from the soon-to-be-released new Star Wars movie, but the effects of plasmons have been known about for centuries. Plasmons are collective oscillations of conduction electrons (those loosely attached to molecules and atoms) that roll across the surfaces of metals while interacting with photons. For example, plasmons from nanoparticles of gold, silver and other metals interact with visible light photons to generate the vibrant colors displayed by stained glass, a technology that dates back more than 1,000 years. But plasmons have high-...
Just as proteins are one of the basic building blocks of biology, nanoparticles can serve as the basic building blocks for next generation materials. In keeping with this parallel between biology and nanotechnology, a proven technique for determining the three dimensional structures of individual proteins has been adapted to determine the 3D structures of individual nanoparticles in solution.
A multi-institutional team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has developed a new technique called “SINGLE” that...
One of the most important things to understand in battery technology is the precise physical and chemical processes that occur at the electrode/electrolyte interface. However, microscopic understanding of these processes is quite limited due to a lack of suitable probing techniques. Now, researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new technique that enables sensitive and specific detection of molecules at the electrode/electrolyte interface.