Researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: It absorbs all the energy contained in sunlight, and generates electrons in a way that makes them easier to capture.

Ohio State University chemists combined electrically conductive plastic with metals including molybdenum and titanium to create a hybrid material.

"There are other such hybrids out there, but the advantage of our material is that we can cover the entire range of the solar spectrum," explained professor Malcolm Chisholm. The study appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sunlight contains the entire spectrum of colors that can be seen with the naked eye — all the colors of the rainbow. What our eyes interpret as color are really different energy levels, or frequencies of light. Today's solar cell materials can capture only a small range of frequencies, so they can only capture a small fraction of the energy contained in sunlight.

This new material is the first that can absorb all the energy contained in visible light at once. The material generates electricity just like other solar cell materials do: Light energizes the atoms of the material and some of the electrons in those atoms are knocked loose.

Ideally, the electrons flow out of the device as electrical current, but this is where most solar cells run into trouble. The electrons stay loose for only a tiny fraction of a second before they sink back into the atoms from which they came. The electrons must be captured during the short time they are free, and this task, called charge separation, is difficult.

At this point, the material is years from commercial development, but this experiment provides a proof of concept — that hybrid solar cell materials such as this one can exhibit unusual properties.