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LED's Efficiency Exceeds 100%
New submitter Paul Fernhout writes "Physicists from MIT claim to have demonstrated that an LED can emit more optical power than the electrical power it consumes. Researchers suggest this LED acts like a heat pump somehow (abstract). Is it true that 230% efficient LEDs seem to violate first law of thermodynamics?"
Exceeds 100% ELECTRICAL efficiency is the key here. The conservation of energy is still intact because it supposedly uses heat energy to supplement.
So if I get the article right - LED cooling?
Really puts a whole new perspective on LED clad 'gaming'-machines, which as you know - should have blue LEDs for cooling, and red LEDs for superior overclocking.
From the article: "The researchers didn’t try to increase this probability, as some previous research has focused on, but instead took advantage of small amounts of excess heat to emit more power than consumed. This heat arises from vibrations in the device’s atomic lattice, which occur due to entropy." The other thing to note is that these LEDs are being run at REALLY low power.
For those wondering about conservation of energy, it's intact. The extra energy comes from heat / vibration in the system.
For those concerned about the second law of thermodynamics, it's not specifically addressed in the article, but the smart money's on entropy increasing in this experiment. The second "law" is really just statistics though (law of large numbers anyone?), and as with most statistics people are still arguing about what it really means. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Controversies and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem
"30 picowatts and measured an output of 69 picowatts of light - an efficiency of 230%. The physical mechanisms worked the same as with any LED: when excited by the applied voltage, electrons and holes have a certain probability of generating photons. The researchers didn’t try to increase this probability, as some previous research has focused on, but instead took advantage of small amounts of excess heat to emit more power than consumed. This heat arises from vibrations in the device’s atomic lattice, which occur due to entropy."
They are not claiming more than 100% efficiency in total terms.
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According to TFA, they are actually taking advantage of other sources of energy in addition to the electricity provided by the wall plug. So it's not really the LED getting "greater than 100% efficiency", it's really "producing more light than you would get if you only took advantage of the electricity from the wall plug".
And they're talking in the range of 69 picowatts of light output, using only 30 picowatts of "wall plug" energy input. So it's quite believable.
Interesting to see the number of posts saying that this is absolutely not possible - reading through the article, it seems possible and maybe there is enough here to study the phenomena enough to warrant more investigations.
The LED seems to be emitting 69 picowatts (pico = 10^-12) when only 30 picowatts of electricity is being pumped in with a measurable decrease in the temperature of the LED. This implies that the LED is acting as a heat pump, converting heat energy into light. If you've ever seen a Peltier cooler in action (or worked through the operation), it seems like to me this is possible.
Note that the power level this phenomenon is observed at is extremely low - the result is maybe good enough for cooling a few molecules of beer - but I think there is something here that should be investigated to see if any usable applications could come out of it.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
No it isn't fiddling with numbers. You are missing the heat pump bit.
The device is taking X amount of energy from the electricity supply and X * 1.3 of energy as thermal and converting this to X * 2.3 as light. i.e. it is 230% efficient when comparing light output to electrical input. Equally, it is 100% efficient when comparing light output to electrical and heat energy input combined.
This does take a little bit of thinking to get your head around but I have a more common example in the shed outside. It contains a heat pump which is 350% efficient. It takes 2kW from the electricity supply and outputs 7kW of heat energy to heat my house. The missing 5kW comes from the pipes in the garden as heat energy. The result being that the garden is slowly being cooled. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
wot no sig
This is not as incredible as it sounds. To explain how it works, it is perhaps easiest to start with a simpler device. I could take a brick, connect a battery to it and say "Look! This brick is only consuming one milliwatt of electric power, yet it is emitting one Watt of infrared radiation. That is 100 000 % efficiency!" If I did the same thing at 1 000 degrees Celcius, the brick would even be emitting visible light (wether connected to a battery or not.)
What the people at MIT do is a little more complicated. They don't use the black body radiation directly. Instead they take electrons that would have emitted infrared photons, add some more energy to them, and get visible light. For this to work, they only have to add the difference between the energy of an infrared photon and a visible photon, yet they get the light output of a visible photon. At a temperature of 135 degrees Celcius (that is 275 degrees Farenheit if you happen to live in Belize or the United States) the difference between the black body radiation and visible light was small enough that they managed to get over 100 % efficiency. No laws of thermodynamics were violated.
It isn't violating the second law for the same reason it's not violating the first -- the system in question is bigger than the LED itself. It includes the environment from which it is obtaining its energy. Local decreases in entropy are not disallowed.
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