When Seth Shumate (’02) first saw the results of his simulation for a new approach to a silicon solar cell in February of this year, he thought something was wrong. What he saw must have been a mistake.
So he did what any good scientist does — he ran another simulation.
“I thought the system was malfunctioning so I took it to another machine, which does a more detailed sort of test, and it was real there, too,” Shumate said with a smile growing across his face. “Then we did it again — over and over and over. It was exciting to see, but I was really skeptical. I thought maybe one of the other grad students had turned up the lamp to give it too much simulated sunlight.”