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Emerging photovoltaics

Selenium hits double digits

Of the many families of solar absorber materials known, only a handful have been shown to convert sunlight into electricity with power conversion efficiencies above 10%. Now, researchers have pushed selenium photovoltaics past this efficiency threshold by implementing a series of improvements to the material processing and device design.

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Fig. 1: The power conversion efficiency (PCE) of various photovoltaic materials relative to their bandgap-dependent Shockley–Queisser (SQ) limit.

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Correspondence to Rasmus Svejstrup Nielsen or Peter Christian Kjærgaard Vesborg.

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Nielsen, R.S., Vesborg, P.C.K. Selenium hits double digits. Nat Energy (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-025-01949-9

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