Right now, the efficiencies of mass-produced silicon photovoltaic panels are closing in on 20 percent, and various thin-film technologies aren't that far behind. Given those gains, organic photovoltaic systems, where efficiencies linger well below 10 percent, would seem to be an afterthought. But solar materials based on organic polymers have a few advantages, in that they're not rigid and opaque like silicon and don't rely on the (sometimes toxic) metals of thin film technologies—there's lots of carbon around, and it's cheap. So there's a healthy amount of effort going into increasing the efficiencies of the organics in the hope that they can become competitive for some applications.
Some good news on that front was published in Nature Materials over the weekend. By adding a thin layer of an organic ferroelectric material to a buckyball-based photovoltaic device, researchers have tripled its efficiency. And, in the process, they've created a photovoltaic device that can be reprogrammed to push current in the opposite direction.
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