In a paper published on the Nature Materials Web site on January 9, senior author and Professor Ted Sargent, Nortel Networks -- Canada Research Chair in Emerging Technologies at the University of Toronto's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his team report on their achievement in tailoring matter to harvest the sun's invisible, infrared rays.

"We made particles from semiconductor crystals which were exactly two, three or four nanometres in size," Sargent said. "The nanoparticles were so small they remained dispersed in everyday solvents just like the particles in paint," explains Sargent.

Sargent's team then tuned the tiny nanocrystals to catch light at very long wavelengths. The result is a sprayable infrared detector.

From Renewable Energy Access

This has a lot of potential for making solar power more useable by acessing the IR portion of the spectrum.