Three and a half months ago I started in my relatively new job as a PhD candidate at Institute for Energy Technology (IFE), located at Kjeller, some 15 kilometres outside of Oslo, Norway. They inagurated a new solar cell laboratory in March 2008, which is where I spend most of my time. The lab is really nice and has a lot of fancy equipment for solar cell manufacturing and characterization. Here are some photos from the lab from a course we did on how to make solar cells from silicon wafers:
As a PhD candidate I am supposed to come up with something new. To get the PhD degree in Norway usually takes three years, and normally you are supposed to publish 4-8 scientific articles in scientific journals or at scientific conferences, and put the publications together in your thesis with an introduction that explains the basis and motivation for your work and how your publications relate to that.
As you might know, solar cells already exist, so I cannot invent them again. A solar cell is a slab of material that converts light directly into electricity by means of the photovoltaic effect. It's based on quite interesting physics, but basically the effect is already explained, and the first solar cell was made in 1883.
But even after more than a hundred years, there is still beeing done a lot of research, and the technology is considered to be at quite an early stage in the learning curve. There is a lot to gain when it comes to efficiency and price, and I think that we will see some major advances in the years to come.
I myself am working on experimental studies on metal hydrides for solar cell applications. The metal hydrides are basically just metals with hydrogen inside, and could therefore be quite accessible and cheap materials. They do generally not occur naturally, as they are somewhat unstable when exposed to air, water, heat and as hydrogen is not so common to find freely in nature. Well, these materials are semiconductors, which means that they are materials that could be suited for making solar cells. They have not been utilized in solar cells before, so there is a long way to go. But I have some good help at IFE from scientists that have experience from working with metal hydrides. IFE has for a long time been working with these materials at candidates for efficient and light-weight hydrogen storage materials, as your possibly future gas tank in your possibly future hydrogen powered car.
So, there is a lot of work to do here, and it's very exciting! I really feel that this could give a small revolution to solar cells and energy production if it works. We'll see in a few years!
