SOLAR PANELS

Physicists predict significant growth for cadmium telluride photovoltaics

A team of scientists analyzes challenges and proposes corresponding research goals in new solar energy research published in the peer-reviewed journal Joule.

University of Toledo

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Dr. Michael Heben is a Distinguished University Professor and McMaster Chair and Director of the Wright Center for Photovoltaics Innovation and Commercialization.

view more 

Credit: The University of Toledo

A solar energy generation technology once considered limited in its potential is poised for significant growth in the United States.

That’s the conclusion of a team of scientists who analyzed the outlook for cadmium telluride photovoltaics in research published in the peer-reviewed journal Joule.

University of Toledo physicists including Dr. Michael Heben, a Distinguished University Professor and McMaster Chair and Director of the Wright Center for Photovoltaics Innovation and Commercialization, collaborated with partners at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory of the Rockies, the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Colorado State University, Sivananthan Labs and First Solar under the umbrella of Department of Energy’s Cadmium Telluride Accelerator Consortium.

Their analysis presents challenges and corresponding research goals that the team of scientists believe will bring this technology to a manufacturing capacity of 100 gigawatts by 2030.

“There are a lot of advantages to cadmium telluride,” Heben said. “They perform better in hot and humid climates than the silicon photovoltaics that currently dominate the industry, and because their manufacturing process leverages domestic supply chains, they’re less sensitive to import restrictions while supporting national energy security.”

Cadmium telluride photovoltaics are a category of thin-film solar cells that have long shown promise as a reliable, low-cost and high-efficiency alternative to the crystalline silicon modules that currently dominate the global solar energy industry.

Cadmium telluride solar cells are the only other photovoltaics to be manufactured at the gigawatt scale, enjoying a particular niche in utility-scale deployment. But comparatively lower power conversion efficiencies and supply chain challenges have limited their share of the total solar power generation portfolio in the United States to approximately 16%.

UToledo is deeply engaged in the research and development of cadmium telluride solar cells through its Wright Center, where physicists’ groundbreaking work on this and other thin-film photovoltaic technologies in large part accounts for UToledo’s rank in the top quarter of global universities in materials science by U.S. News & World Report.

First Solar, the world’s largest manufacturer of cadmium telluride solar panels with a major presence in northwest Ohio, notably traces its roots to early work completed in campus labs in the 1980s.

The Joule research makes a case for significant growth potential in cadmium telluride photovoltaics, taking into account factors like economic policies favoring domestic manufacturing and technological advancements improving power conversion efficiency.

“Cadmium telluride has much more room to grow in performance compared to silicon,” Heben said. “The technology is very reliable and predictable, while the energy conversion efficiency is constantly moving upward.”

Scientists also address technological and supply chain advancements related to the element tellurium. They credit the technological advancements with enabling more efficient extraction and utilization of this mining byproduct, and they cite economic and industry data to demonstrate that its availability is not proving to be the limiting growth factor that manufacturers once predicted it would be.

It all adds up to a promising outlook for cadmium telluride photovoltaics.

“This research is essentially a roadmap for further growing and expanding this technology,” Heben said.

---

Journal

Joule

DOI

10.1016/j.joule.2025.102235 

Article Title

Roadmap to 100 GWDC: Scientific and Supply Chain Challenges for CdTe Photovoltaics

Liverpool scientists discover graphene’s electronic properties in 3D material in boost for green computing

University of Liverpool

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

University of Liverpool researchers have discovered a way to host some of the most significant properties of graphene in a three‑dimensional (3D) material, potentially removing the hurdles for these properties to be used at scale in green computing.

Graphene is famous for being incredibly strong, lightweight, and an excellent conductor of electricity and its applications range from electronics to aerospace and medical technologies. However, its two-dimensional (2D) structure makes it mechanically fragile and limits its use in demanding environments and large-scale applications.

In a paper published today, a team of researchers have identified that 3D material, HfSn₂, mimics graphene’s fast, 2D electron flow. This ground-breaking discovery offers opportunities for designing materials that are more stable yet that still show advanced low‑energy electronic behaviour. Such materials are attractive for next‑generation, low‑energy logic and spintronic devices, which are central to future computing technologies.

The work was jointly led by Dr Jonathan Alaria (Physic), and Professor Matthew Rosseinsky OBE FRS, (Chemistry), highlighting the essential synergy between physics and chemistry that underpins this discovery. The team used a combination of theoretical modelling and experiments on high‑quality single crystals grown in the laboratory. Here researchers showed that HfSn₂ contains honeycomb layers arranged in three dimensions in a special chiral stacking pattern (similar to the twist in DNA). This arrangement preserves the unique electronic behaviour normally seen only in 2D materials.

These honeycomb layers also allow the material to host Weyl points - unusual points in the electronic structure that can dramatically enhance how easily electrons move. As a result, electrons in HfSn₂ act as if they are travelling in a 2D material, even though the structure itself is fully 3D.

The paper’s key finding is that the way electrons move in HfSn₂ can behave like a 2D system, even though the atoms form a strong 3D network. This means the electronic behaviour can be separated from the actual structure of the material. It also shows that 2D‑like performance is possible in materials that are much more robust than typical layered crystals.

The HfSn₂ study demonstrates how carefully controlling chemical bonding and stacking patterns in direct physical space can be used to tune electronic behaviour in energy–momentum space.

Dr Jonathan Alaria, Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Liverpool, said: “Our work shows that 2D‑like electronic transport can be realised within a fully 3D material. Demonstrating this required advanced physics experiments under extreme conditions, combined with close collaboration with our chemistry colleagues. This synergy was vital and we could only uncover these new concepts by uniting theoretical modelling, crystal growth and high‑field transport measurements.”

Professor Matt Rosseinsky concluded: “We asked ourselves, do materials need to be two‑dimensional to behave like graphene, or can we create graphene‑like properties in completely different kinds of materials with higher structural dimensions? These results show the power of chemistry to generate counter-intuitive properties by controlling the atomic arrangements that determine function and suggest there may be broader opportunities to generate two-dimensional high mobility for low-energy electronic devices beyond reliance on structurally layered materials.”

This research forms part of the EPSRC Programme Grant “Digital Navigation of Chemical Space for Function”, an £8.6 million initiative that aims to change how functional materials are discovered. By merging cutting-edge physical science with advanced computer science, including AI and machine learning, the project is developing digital tools and workflows that can identify entirely new classes of materials and evaluate their properties in the context of technological opportunities. The work was performed in collaboration with the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Liverpool, the Max Planck Institute for the Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, and the Academic Centre for Materials and Nanotechnology at AGH University of Krakow.

The paper, ‘Decoupling structural and electronic dimensionality: 2D transport in a 3D honeycomb chiral stacking’, will be published in Matter on Tuesday 27 January 2026, 11 AM EST (DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2025.102578).

---

Journal

Matter

DOI

10.1016/j.matt.2025.102578 

Article Title

Decoupling structural and electronic dimensionality: 2D transport in a 3D honeycomb chiral stacking

Article Publication Date

27-Jan-2026

 

Tiny gold spheres could improve solar energy harvesting

American Chemical Society

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

This supraball (top) is 2100 nanometers in diameter and is made from hundreds of tiny gold nanoparticles (bottom) engineered to boost solar energy absorption.

view more 

Credit: Adapted from ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2026, DOI: 10.1021/acsami.5c23149

Sunbeams contain a lot of energy. But current technology for harvesting solar power doesn’t capture as much as it could. Now, in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, researchers report that gold nanospheres, named supraballs, can absorb nearly all wavelengths in sunlight — including some that traditional photovoltaic materials miss. Applying a layer of supraballs onto a commercially available electricity converter demonstrated that the technology nearly doubled solar energy absorption compared to traditional materials.

Scientists are exploring materials that absorb light across the solar spectrum to improve solar energy harvesting. Gold and silver nanoparticles (NPs) have been suggested as a solution because they’re easy and cost-effective to make, but current NPs’ light absorption is confined to visible wavelengths — a fraction of the full solar spectrum. To capture additional wavelengths, including near-infrared light, Jaewon Lee, Seungwoo Lee and Kyung Hun Rho propose using self-assembling gold supraballs. These structures consist of gold NPs that clump together and form tiny spheres. The diameter of the supraballs was adjusted to maximize the absorption of wavelengths present in sunlight.

The researchers first used computer simulations to optimize the design of individual supraballs and to predict the performance of supraball films. Results from the simulations showed that the supraballs should absorb more than 90% of wavelengths from sunlight.

Next, they created a film of gold supraballs by drying a liquid solution containing the structures on the surface of a commercially available thermoelectric generator (TEG), a device that converts light energy into electricity. The films were created in ambient room conditions — no clean rooms or extreme temperatures required.

In demonstrations with an LED solar simulator, the supraball-coated TEG had an average solar absorption of about 89%, nearly twice that of a TEG with a conventional film made from single gold NPs (45%).

“Our plasmonic supraballs offer a simple route to harvesting the full solar spectrum,” says Seungwoo Lee. “Ultimately, this coating technology could significantly lower the barrier for high-efficiency solar-thermal and photothermal systems in real-world energy applications.”

The authors acknowledge funding from the National Research Foundation of Korea, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Institutional Program, the Korea-US Collaborative Research Fund, and a Korea University grant.

###

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1876 and chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is committed to improving all lives through the transforming power of chemistry. Its mission is to advance scientific knowledge, empower a global community and champion scientific integrity, and its vision is a world built on science. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, e-books and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

Registered journalists can subscribe to the ACS journalist news portal on EurekAlert! to access embargoed and public science press releases. For media inquiries, contact newsroom@acs.org.

Note: ACS does not conduct research but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies.

Follow us: Facebook | LinkedIn | Instagram

---

Journal

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces

DOI

10.1021/acsami.5c23149 

Article Title

“Plasmonic Supraballs for Scalable Broadband Solar Energy Harvesting”

Article Publication Date

25-Jan-2026

PRONOUNCED; NOOGING

‘Nudging’ both patients and providers boosts flu vaccine numbers

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

PHILADELPPHIA—Patients were 28 percent more likely to get a flu shot when they got a text message reminder and their primary care provider already had an order for the shot waiting, new research from the Perelman School of Medicine showed. The study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine. 

“This is important given the rise in vaccine hesitancy, which has resulted in a downward trend in flu vaccination that coincided with a high rate of hospitalization this flu season,” said the study’s lead author, Shivan Mehta, MD, MBA, MSHP, associate chief innovation officer at Penn Medicine. “Many nudge interventions directed to patients only on vaccinations have shown limited effectiveness in the United States, so we wanted to make sure that we addressed both sides of the exam room: the patient and the clinician.”   

The researchers believe these results might point to some strategies that could help boost how many people get the shot every year for an illness that has hospitalized up to 710,000 people each year since 2010—and killed as many as 52,000 Americans annually. 

Nudging versus standard care 

The study tested several forms of “nudging,” a behavioral science concept that means small tweaks that make the healthiest choices the easiest ones. Patients who were eligible for the vaccine received flu shot reminder texts (or automated voice recordings), had automatic orders for a flu shot waiting for their clinician to approve, and monthly personalized messages were sent to providers that compared their patients’ vaccination rates to their clinician peers. 

More than 52,000 people were randomly assigned to two groups: one that received all of the nudges or a “standard care” control group at either the University of Pennsylvania Health System or the University of Washington’s health system, UW Medicine The standard care team didn’t get any of the nudges and followed the usual path for getting a flu vaccine, which relies largely on the clinician remembering to offer the vaccine based on information in the electronic health records. Researchers found that almost 3,000 more people got flu shots when they were nudged than would have been expected if they got normal care. 

Why nudging patients and clinicians worked 

Mehta and his colleagues are encouraged by their findings, driven mainly by the importance of communication and trust. 

“We think the automatic order encouraged primary care physicians to have a conversation with their patients, and we know these clinicians still have a lot of trust from their communities,” said co-senior author Amol Navathe, MD, PhD, a professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, as well as a professor of Health Care Management in the Wharton School.  

The work continues at scale 

The team has replicated their work at Lancaster General Health in the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which serves a rural and suburban patient base that looks somewhat different than the study populations in this study drawn largely from Philadelphia and Seattle. They are still analyzing the results of this replication study.  

Since the work leverages existing tools in the electronic health record along with other available technologies but no additional staffing or human effort, it could be particularly attractive to health systems looking to augment their flu shot efforts.  

“Future interventions could be more successful by complementing the automated communication with clinical staff to engage with patients that are still hesitant, and integrating flu vaccine nudges with other interventions focused on preventive health, like cancer screening,” Mehta said.  

---

Journal

JAMA Internal Medicine

DOI

10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.7133 

Method of Research

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

Subject of Research

People

THE NEW GREEN REVOLUTION

Grant to expand self-cloning crop technology for Indian farmers

Plant biologist receives grant to produce higher-yielding crops for sustainable agriculture

University of California - Davis

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

Venkatesan Sundaresan, a Distinguished Professor of plant biology and plant sciences at the University of California, Davis, has been awarded a Gates Foundation grant to develop self-cloning crops for Indian farmers. The five-year, $4.9 million project is a collaboration with researchers Myeong-Je Cho at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), Viswanathan Chinnusamy at the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR-IARI), New Delhi and Ravi Maruthachalam at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER-Thiruvananthapuram). 

The project aims to sustainably improve agricultural productivity by producing high-yielding crops that clone themselves, allowing farmers to save their superior seeds from one season to the next. It’s based on a technology called “synthetic apomixis,” which Sundaresan’s lab previously developed in rice. 

With the new funding, the team will expand the technology into other staple crops, starting with pearl millet and Indian mustard, two crops that are regionally important in India but do not usually receive international research attention.

“It’s wonderful that the Gates Foundation has taken an interest in this technology,” said Sundaresan. “Their funding makes it possible for us to apply our method to specific crops in contexts where it can make a difference.”

Giving neglected crops the attention they deserve

Pearl millet and Indian mustard (also known as brown mustard) are widely cultivated in India, but are not traded much internationally. That means they receive less attention from funding agencies, seed developers and agricultural companies.

“Big seed companies generally want to work on huge worldwide crops like corn, soybeans and tomatoes,” said Sundaresan. “The technology we develop with this grant will directly benefit smallholder farmers in developing countries.”

Like many other crops, pearl millet and Indian mustard produce higher yields through hybrid breeding — when two genetically different varieties are crossbred. However, hybrid seeds are expensive to produce and must be purchased each year, because when hybrid plants self-fertilize, their optimal genetic combination gets scrambled, resulting in offspring with sub-par yields. 

To make hybrid crops’ high-yielding capacity stable from generation to generation, Sundaresan’s lab developed synthetic apomixis, which allows plants to clone themselves. Self-cloning hybrid varieties of pearl millet and Indian mustard will be more accessible to smallholder farmers.

Branching from grains to vegetable crops 

Sundaresan’s team originally developed synthetic apomixis in rice and has shown that the same approach can work in maize. An independent research team recently used their methods to produce self-cloning sorghum.

Extending synthetic apomixis to Indian mustard may present an additional hurdle, because it belongs to a very different branch of the plant evolutionary tree. Whereas rice, sorghum and pearl millet are all grass-like monocots, Indian mustard is a dicot in the same genus as cabbage, kale and broccoli. Because embryonic development is different in dicots, the researchers may need to significantly modify parts of their method in order to obtain self-cloning mustard. If they succeed, it will open up the possibility of using synthetic apomixis in a broad range of vegetable crops.

“It may be more complicated to move this technology into dicots, because the embryo initiation process is a little different, but I'm hoping that in five years, we'll have the technology working in Indian mustard,” said Sundaresan. “Our discoveries will also yield valuable information for other dicot crops.”

A tweak to remove transgenics 

In addition to extending synthetic apomixis to new crop species, the project aims to tweak the technology so that it no longer involves transgenics — the insertion of foreign DNA from one species into another. Instead, the researchers want to develop a version of synthetic apomixis that relies exclusively on gene editing, which involves mutating or editing an organism’s existing genes using methods such as CRISPR/Cas9.

Doing so will make synthetic apomixis more widely accessible, because gene-edited crops are usually subject to less stringent regulations than transgenic crops. India recently passed laws to deregulate gene-edited crops, which means that, if successful, any self-cloning varieties produced through this project will be treated in the same way as conventionally bred varieties.

“The time is right to develop these crops in India,” said Sundaresan. “If the technology is a success there, I think it will quickly become adopted by other countries around the developing world. I'm hoping that we have, so to speak, the seeds of a new agricultural revolution in place.”