Silicon-based solar panels are four times as efficient as plants at harvesting energy from sunlight. But they're expensive to produce because the material they're made of has to be very precisely engineered. What if we could make solar panels out of copper oxides, where the imperfections in the material are what makes them effective? I talk to two researchers who used a supercomputer to discover this.

The research we're discussing is published here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.2c16889