Five Los Alamos Innovations Win R&D 100 Awards
Turning Windows and Building Facades into Energy-Producing Solar Panels: Engineered Quantum Dots for Luminescent Solar Concentrators won the Green Technology Special Recognition Award. These revolutionary semitransparent windows contain highly emissive semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots) that collect sunlight for photovoltaics and provide a desired degree of shading. The material can turn windows and building facades into electrical generators of nonpolluting power. The nontoxic dots absorb the sunlight, re-emit it at a longer wavelength and waveguide it towards edge-installed photovoltaic cells to produce electricity. This technology can transform once-passive building facades into power-generation units, which can be particularly useful in densely populated areas.
Los Alamos submitted the joint entry with co-developer University of Milano-Bicocca. Victor I. Klimov of Physical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy led the team of Kirill Velizhanin of Physics and Chemistry of Materials, Hunter McDaniel (former Los Alamos postdoctoral researcher, currently with UbiQD LLC), Sergio Brovelli and Francesco Meinardi (University of Milano-Bicocca).
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