US team claims solar cell efficiency breakthrough

Research carried out at Columbia University in the US could lead to the development of solar cells with double the efficiency of conventional silicon-based technology.
The team’s work – reported in the journal Science – focused on a class of materials known as Hybrid Organic Inorganic Perovskites (HOIPs).
Silicon panels, which currently dominate the solar energy market, must have a purity of 99.999 percent to be effective and even microscopic defects can dramatically affect the