Indoor photovoltaics awaken the world’s first solar cells

Selenium (Se) solar cells were the world’s first solid-state photovoltaics reported in 1883, opening the modern photovoltaics. However, its wide bandgap (~1.9 eV) limits sunlight harvesting. Here, we revisit the world’s oldest but long-ignored photovoltaic material with the emergence of indoor photovoltaics (IPVs); the absorption spectrum of Se perfectly matches the emission spectra of commonly used indoor light sources in the 400 to 700 nm range. We find that the widely used Te adhesion layer also passivates defects at the nonbonded Se/TiO(2) interface. By optimizing the Te coverage from 6.9 to 70.4%, the resulting Se cells exhibit an efficiency of 15.1% under 1000 lux indoor illumination and show no efficiency loss after 1000 hours of continuous indoor illumination without encapsulation, outperforming the present IPV industry standard of amorphous silicon cells in both efficiency and stability. We further fabricate Se modules (6.75 cm(2)) that produce 232.6 μW output power under indoor illumination, powering a radio-frequency identification–based localization tag.