Creating Electric Power From Light Using Gold Nanoparticles

cyberfringe writes "Professor of Materials Science Dawn Bonnell and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered a way to turn optical radiation into electrical current that could lead to self-powering molecular circuits and efficient data storage. They create surface plasmons that ride the surface of gold nanoparticles on a glass substrate. Surface plasmons were found to increase the efficiency of current production by a factor of four to 20, and with many independent parameters to optimize, enhancement factors could reach into the thousands. 'If the efficiency of the system could be scaled up without any additional, unforeseen limitations, we could conceivably manufacture a 1A, 1V sample the diameter of a human hair and an inch long,' Prof. Bonnell explained. The academic paper was published in the current issue of ACS Nano. (Abstract available for free.) The significance? This may allow the creation of nano-sized circuits that can power themselves through sunlight (or another directed light source). Delivery of power to nanodevices is one of the big challenges in the field."

Comments

Re:"Self-powering"

[ircmaxell]

That kind of density is amazing. If they could produce it cheap enough, it could have applications on the macro scale as well. 1 hair width is 100 m, so you could fit about 2540 of these wires side by side in 1 inch. So your power generation would be around 2.5kW per square inch. That means a 4 foot by 8 foot panel would be able to generate around 11.7 mW (yes, that's megawatts). So, that means one of four things.

• This is a gross exaggeration of its capabilities
• This is exactly what they are capable of
• They cannot be placed right next to each other (or at least efficiency suffers if you do)
• Efficiency won't scale well at all (with length)

Still, it's a cool concept...