The eyes of moths, which allow them to see well at night, are covered with a water-repellent, antireflective coating that makes the eyes one of the least reflective surfaces in the natural world and helps them hide from predators in the dark.

A team of researchers in Japan has created a film mimicking the moth eye's microstructure as a covering for solar cells that can cut down on the amount of reflected light and help capture more power from the sun, a release by the Optical Society of America said Thursday.

"Surface reflections are an essential loss for any type of photovoltaic module, and ultimately low reflections are desired," Noboru Yamada, a scientist at Nagaoka University of Technology Japan, says.

The team calculated how the anti-reflection film would improve the yearly performance of solar cells deployed over large areas in Tokyo or Phoenix.

They chose to model the two cities because Phoenix is a sunbelt city with high annual amounts of direct sunlight, while Tokyo is well outside the sunbelt region with a high fraction of diffuse solar radiation.

They estimate the films would improve the annual efficiency of solar cells by 6 percent in Phoenix and by 5 percent in Tokyo.

"People may think this improvement is very small, but the efficiency of photovoltaics is just like fuel consumption rates of road vehicles," says Yamada. "Every little bit helps."

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