Surprisingly or not, IBM really wants to develop a new technology that could help harnessing solar power. The researchers from IBM designed a system based on the concentrator photovoltaics technique which is very similar to the thing that we all did when we were kids - we used a magnifying glass to burn thing by focusing solar rays on them.

The system that IBM developed combines large lenses and photovoltaic cells which managed to concentrate 230 watts of solar energy per square centimeter. This technique produces somewhere around 70 watts of electrical power which makes it five times more efficient than conventional solar cells used in solar farms.

Don’t think that it was easy to do this, because the researchers had a very hard job trying to cool down the chips which were heated by the concentrated sunlight. The developers used the same idea as the one for semiconductors which it’s based on liquid metal cooling system. The IBM researchers tied the chips to cooling block using a thin liquid metal gallium-indium compound which proved to be very efficient.

This technology is low cost, but it could have many advantages like smaller solar farms and it could produce more energy using existing systems.

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