Black silicon' boosts solar cell efficiency

An ultra-sensitive form of the silicon used in most solar panels may soon help to harness the near limitless power of the sun.

Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University, discovered black silicon by accident in his laboratory in 1998 when one of his research team blasted normal silicon with a very short laser pulse. Almost a decade later, the company created to commercialise his work, SiOnyx, has announced the production of the first commercial-grade wafers...Making textured surfaces on silicon is already possible, notes Keith Barnham [Physics], a physicist at Imperial College London who works on PV cells. 'What's important is if this [technique] helps the light absorption so that you can get away with thinner cells. There has been a silicon shortage and the price is not coming down, so the less you use of it the better. With good light-trapping, which is what these can do, you can hope to get higher efficiency in a much thinner cell.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/15/alternativeenergy