"Ialways wanted to be an inventor," says Henry Snaith happily. The 35-year-old physicist at the University of Oxford, UK, has fulfilled that childhood ambition in spectacular style. This year, Snaith amazed materials researchers by massively boosting the efficiency of solar cells made with perovskite semiconductors (M. Liu et al. Nature 501,395-398; 2013). For a fewyears, other researchers have used these materials to make lower-efficiency, complex photovoltaic devices, but Snaith realized that they could be harnessed in a much purer and cheaper design. They are now on the brink of commercialization.
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