Black silicon with quasi-regular arrays of micrometer-sized spikes, which is obtained by irradiating the surface of a Si wafer with ultrafast laser pulses in the presence of a chalcogen-bearing gas, or prepared by ion implantation and pulsed-laser-melting-induced rapid solidification, holds great promise in the preparation of high performance intermediate band solar cells. This new material has unusual optical and electrical properties, such as strong absorption of light with wavelength between 0.25 μm and 17 μm, nice field emission characteristics and so on, offers silicon many new features. Professor Mazur predicted that black silicon would have incomparable superiority to other materials in solar cell field. Besides, black silicon has important potential applications in the fields of detector, sensor, display technology, microelectronics and so on. The forming mechanism, recent development, photoelectric characteristics and application prospect of black silicon are introduced in this paper.