Tiny hills and valleys on the surface of leaves have guided a team of Princeton University scientists in the creation of a new kind of solar cell. By wrinkling up a layer of adhesive, the team designed solar cells that can capture more light, even in the infrared region.
“If you look at leaves very closely, they are not smooth,” said Yueh-Lin Loo, Princeton’s principle investigator on the project. “We’d like to mimic this geometric effect in synthetic, man-made light-harvesting systems.”