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Capturing Solar Power With Antennae
necro81 writes "Researchers at the University of Missouri and the Idaho National Laboratory have demonstrated a new method of capturing solar power. Rather than using semiconductors to capture photons of sunlight, they fabricated small coiled antennae (several um square) that resonate with the wave nature of light. The antennae are tuned towards midrange infrared light (5-10 um), which is abundant on our cozy-warm Earth — even at night. They also demonstrated a way to imprint these coils on a substrate, like how CDs or vinyl records are produced, but could be scaled to roll-to-roll mass production. The usual caveat applies: it may be 5-10 years until this could hit the market."
Antennae are for bugs.
Haida Manga
Beware the PDF link
I think you see the problem - I *am* in a related field and I certainly don't know of any practical or efficient way to rectify it. I can think of absurdly inefficient ways, but we already have a bunch of those.
Doctor of Chiropractic (DC) are indeed doctors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_education
But not medical doctors. Considering the subject at hand was medical, all reputation is out the window.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Yup, the correct term is "Doctor of Chiropractic," though I'm sure that's not what you actually meant.
No, it's not an MD. The term "doctor" is fairly general, and used in a wide manner to mean people other than those who can prescribe controlled substances or perform surgery.
The newsworthiness is that instead of only 250 million nantennas on one small square like in that INL page, these guys replicated a design onto an "8 inch round silicon wafer" with 10 billion antenna elements. And they did it with high detail and little loss between the "master print" and the copy.
What are they using to rectify the signal to convert to DC?
Unobtainum diodes. They don't actually know how to do that.
Terahertz diodes do exist. Low-cost, high-efficiency, integrated terahertz diodes, no. But as work proceeds on terahertz electronics, someone may solve that problem. Each nanoantenna needs its own nanodiode, so the diodes have to be fabricated on the substrate with the antenna, which complicates the fab problem. The enthusiasm about roll-to-roll low cost fabrication in the article is premature. We'll probably see this working first on a wafer, and it may not be cheap.
Even if it's expensive, there's an initial market for satellite power panels. The performance improvement would be worth it.
Antennae are for bugs.
Funny you should mention that.
Apparently insects have similar antenna systems in their antennae to detect pheromones by their infrared signature. Also electret excitation structures attached other antenna structures to emit tuned infrared when pumped by grooming.
Here's one reference.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way