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.
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.
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.
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.