ST. PETERSBURG, March 3. /TASS/. Russian Nobel Prize winner in physics Zhores Alferov said on Tuesday he was quitting research administration to get back to experimental physics.
Alferov told TASS he planned to take part in research on boosting the efficiency of silicon solar cell batteries on new research equipment at the Academic University. The equipment was bought by the university at three million euro.
"The practical goal of our research is to boost the efficiency of solar batteries and to develop new principles of the realization of integrated circuit units," he said, adding that the planned to take part in experiments personally.
He said interest to solar energy could be explained by the fact that by the mid-21st century it would be more profitable to pack and use solar energy than to use the energy of oil product combustion or nuclear fission. "The efficiency of solar batteries is increasing. In ten to fifteen years, photoelectric energy will become economically advantageous and will supersede hydrocarbon combustion energy and nuclear energy," Alferov said, adding that solar energy generation was on the rise in the world. "In 2014, a total of 187 gigawatt of electricity was generated by solar batteries worldwide. Aggregate capacity of all Russia’s electricity plants is 140 gigawatt," he noted.