Fool's gold
Treasure for solar cell developers
Pyrite (Courtesy Oregon State University).
Pyrite, better known as "fool's gold," was known to the ancient Romans and has led prospectors astray for centuries. But it has now also helped some researchers discover related substances that they say offer new, cheap and promising options for solar energy. The new compounds, unlike some solar cell materials made from rare, expensive or toxic elements, would be benign and could be processed from some of the most plentiful elements, say the scientists. Findings have been published in the research journal Advanced Energy Materials. Apparently ever the unwanted sibling, pyrite itself is as considered about as useless for solar energy as it is as a substitute for the yellow metal, which it deceptively resembles. But for more than 25 years, the mineral, also called iron pyrite, was known to have some qualities that made it of interest for solar energy. That spurred the recent research. The results have been anything but foolish, said Douglas Keszler, a chemist at Oregon State University, where the U.S. Energy Department-funded investigations are under way. "We've known for a long time that pyrite was interesting for its solar properties, but that it didn't actually work," he explained. "We didn't really know why, so we decided to take another look at it. In this process we've discovered some different materials that are similar to pyrite, with most of the advantages but none of the problems. "There's still work to do in integrating these materials into actual solar cells," Keszler said. "But fundamentally, it's very promising."
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