Solar researchers and company executives think there's a good chance the economics of the $42 billion industry will soon be disrupted by something called perovskites, a range of materials that can be used to harvest light when turned into a crystalline structure.

The hope is that perovskites, which can be mixed into liquid solutions and deposited on a range of surfaces, could play a crucial role in the expansion of solar energy applications with cells as efficient as those currently made with silicon. One British company aims to have a thin-film perovskite solar cell commercially available by the end of 2018.

"This is the front-runner of low-cost solar cell technologies," said Hiroshi Segawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo who's leading a five-year project funded by the Japanese government that groups together universities and companies such as Panasonic Corp. and Fujifilm Corp. to develop perovskite technology.