If you've bought a solar panel, you want every photon that lands
on it to work towards generating electricity. The more photons
you absorb, the more electricity you generate. But, at present,
a typical silicon solar cell only absorbs about two-thirds of
the sunlight that strikes it, while the remaining third is
reflected. Shawn-Yu Lin, a professor of physics at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, has developed an anti-reflective coating
(actually seven layers of coating) that raise the absorption of
a solar panel to almost 100 percent. A typical silicon solar
cell with this anti-reflective coating will absorb 96.21 percent
of the sunlight that strikes it, and less than 4% of the light
is reflected. Typical antireflective coatings are engineered to
transmit light of one particular wavelength. Lin’s new coating
stacks seven of these layers, one on top of the other, in such a
way that each layer enhances the antireflective properties of
the layer below it. These additional layers also help to “bend”
the flow of su