
Hybrid materials could smash the solar efficiency ceiling - petercooper
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/hybrid-materials-could-smash-the-solar-efficiency-ceiling
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ChuckMcM
Always makes for a great headline, always disappoints down the road. It
reminds my of the comedy sketch talking about how the flying pig they are
developing is going to cut the cost of delivering bacon to market to
practically nothing.

Yes, and as the author says, _“If we can combine materials like pentacene with
conventional semiconductors like silicon, it would allow us to break through
the fundamental ceiling on the efficiency of solar cells.”_ Which is both
true, and the bane of several billions of dollars in investment in genechips
and various other mixed organic/silicon design concepts. That is a really
really really hard problem, and if you can crack it then all sorts of fun
stuff is possible, not the least of which are chips that could talk directly
to your neurons (my personal favorite). Nice to see that they have some
additional insight into photosynthesis though.

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selimthegrim
Yeah, the big sticking point here is that it's an absolute nightmare to try
and figure out what is going on at the interfaces. Current theory does not do
a very good job at all and is monstrously computationally expensive,
especially if they are going to wave their hands and point to "wavefunction
overlap". You need a 1-D electronic theory to describe singlet fission -
talking about wavefunctions is meaningless when you're in a bosonic sector.
You need to talk about _fields_, not a mention of which I see in these papers.

EDIT: To be less cryptic, this is what I mean:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_quantization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_quantization)

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selimthegrim
I study the theory of singlet fission with collaborators at Brookhaven. It's
great to see they're moving towards inorganic substrates, but they're barking
up the wrong tree with this Dexter transfer theory. The experimentalists keep
insisting on viewing this as a kinetic phenomenon when the key is really
geometric effects on the electronic structure of the polymer - they are
failing to interpret their own data correctly. I really hope we can convince
them to try topologically nontrivial materials as substrates - I fear the
surface traps in QDs will be a roadblock otherwise as they say.

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delecti
I feel like "Could" needs to be added as a corollary of Betteridge's law of
headlines.

Maybe I missed it in the article, but it doesn't sound like they've replicated
this effect on the macro scale.

