A solar cell, also called a photovoltaic cell ... Each semi-conducting material has a characteristic "band gap" or a spectrum of electron energies which the material simply cannot abide.

all the electrons exit the solar panel with about the same energy as the band gap of the solar cell material. Obviously, it would be nice to keep the excess energy from going to waste like this.

It states that a single solar cell can only have an efficiency of around 32% for the most popular material, silicon. Even with some other semiconductor material with a higher band gap, peak ...

However, this would only be possible by using wide-band-gap semiconductors, which have not been considered for solar cells used for land-based applications because their band gaps are too large.

Solar cells based on wide-band-gap semiconductors work better under water than the narrow-band-gap ones used in conventional silicon photovoltaic devices. This finding by researchers at New York ...

We believe that the most promising approach to reaching this goal is to make tandem solar cells with a high band gap solar cell harvesting the high-energy photons and a lower bandgap solar cell ...

(Nanowerk Spotlight) In recent years, polymer solar cells have drawn considerable research interest due to their attractive features including flexibility, semi-transparency, and manufacturability ...

Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have broken the world record for solar cell efficiency ... other materials with a wider band gap, electrons are confined to two ...