Saturday, March 10, 2012

Mini update

I am out on a brief break, but I wold be remiss if I didn't point out this exciting result. The investigators have managed to make a light emitting diode with greater than 100% electrical efficiency when operated just right. The trick is, the LED gets the energy for the "extra" photons from the temperature difference between the LED and it's surroundings. Basically it's a combination LED and heat engine. Very clever. I wonder if there are some entropy restrictions that come into play, particularly if the final photon state is, e.g., the macroscopically occupied state of a laser cavity.

1 comment:

David Brown said...

I read in a biography of Telsa that he was outraged that people didn't make more use of heat engines. He felt that every smokestack should make use of heat engines.