Researchers explain how dye-based nanotubes can help harvest light’s energy
Companies that make commercial solar cells are happy if they can achieve 20 percent efficiency when converting sunlight to electricity; an improvement of even 1 percent is seen as major progress. But nature, which has had billions of years to fine-tune photosynthesis, can do much better: Microorganisms called green sulfur bacteria, which live deep in the ocean where there’s hardly any light available, manage to harvest 98 percent of the energy in the light that reaches them.Now, researchers led by an MIT postdoc have analyzed an artificial system that models the light-capturing method used by deep-sea bacteria. Further advances in understanding fundamental light-harvesting processes may yield entirely new approaches to capturing solar energy, the researchers say. Their results were reported July 1 in the journal Nature Chemistry.The artificial system, described in an earlier paper by postdoc Dörthe M. Eisele of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and collaborators, consists of a...