Now this... this is *really* fast

A pal of mine from grad school, Mark Rodwell, has been trying to make 1 THz transistors for awhile now. Eventually you get limited by the plasma frequ ency of the free charge, which iirc is a few THz in semiconductors but a fe w petahertz in metals. That's one reason I worked on metal-insulator-metal (MIM) junctions--they're fast enough to rectify light.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

So a solar panel made as a crystal set comprising zillions of tiny antennae feeding individual high speed rectifiers to solve the world's energy problems!

Cheers

On Wed, 4 Nov 2015 15:21:28 +0000, Syd Rumpo Gave us:

snip

You should tell Tesla.

You laugh. Some of my devices got above 7% quantum efficiency, and that was with basically just me working on it. (I did much of the processing and ev en wrote a big-iron optimizing EM simulator code to get there.) If the shu nt resistance can be increased and the asymmetry improved, it could be.

I have a project along those lines in the offing--the PO has been cut, but I'm waiting for the State Department to rule on whether it's ITAR-controlle d or not. (The customer is overseas.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Not as crazy as it might seem to you!

joe

'Rectannas' for microwaves have been around for a while, but optical frequencies appear to be a bit more of a challenge...

--sp

Would the overall efficiency be abut the same as the conventional photo capture method?

Better; solar cells use a mechanism that is forever limited to 50% energy recovery, while an array of rectennae is only limited by impedance matching (if you know the input is narrowband, it's easy to make the correct geometry).

It's a little more complicated than that. Tunnel junction rectennas operate in different physical regimes for different frequencies. In the low-energy limit (h nu / e

I was going to ask why 50 % but I found this...

George H.

And I remember seeing a patent on that. An example in a whiz-bang article about "super-inventors", one of those guys who patented a record number of patents. Basically, every idea where he could get legal paper. (Lemulson(?)).

There was a news item in a recent New Scientist about a report of the development of one of the blackest black coatings. It was described as a coating containing hammer shaped gold nanostructures. One thing was that it could be combined with a dye so that it would absorb energy on a broad range of wavelengths and emit the light on the one determined by the dye.

First thought: combine this with the rectenna solar cell tuned the output color/frequency of the dye.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

On Wed, 4 Nov 2015 13:16:52 -0500, Phil Hobbs Gave us:

Maybe it is a case of (side) lobal warming. :-)