"What's remarkable is that this level of efficiency had not been expected for many years," Green said. "A recent study by Germany's Agora Energiewende think tank set an aggressive target of 35% efficiency by 2050 for a module that uses unconcentrated sunlight, such as the standard ones on family homes."

To reach the record breaking result, the scientists used a 28 centimeter-square, four-junction mini solar module which was embedded in a prism. The prism split the sun's rays into four bands, which allowed it to extract more electricity than usual. It also wouldn't be difficult to scale the setup to a larger 800 centimeter-square array. "There'll be some marginal loss from interconnection in the scale-up, but we are so far ahead that it's entirely feasible," Keevers said.