A domestic research team has developed a new technology to generate a large amount of hydrogen from water using visible sunlight.

The team led by Professor Yi Jong-heop at Seoul National University said Monday that using visible light, which makes up the most part of sunlight, it generated 74 times more hydrogen than through conventional methods.

The team said that based on the ideas of how gold particles absorb visible light to produce hot electrons, the researchers developed nanostructures with gold particles attached.

The team said that it used the nanostructures to develop an efficient way to produce hydrogen by significantly stabilizing the state of hot electrons.

The conventional production method is inefficient because it uses ultraviolet rays, which make up just four percent of sunlight. The new method is expected to enable mass-production of hydrogen, which can be used as a new energy source.

The findings appeared on Angewandte Chemie, a German weekly scientific journal.