Solar Cells That Emit Light Break Efficiency Record

benfrog writes "Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley say they have come up with a counter-intuitive way of making solar cells more efficient — making them emit light. In a press release the scientists claim to be the first to demonstrate that the better solar cells are at emitting photons (the more LED-like they are), the more efficient they are at generating electricity. However, 'unlike an LED, the electrons in a solar cell are absorbing photons from an exterior source as well as emitting their own.'"

Comments

What's counter-intuitive about it?

[SirGarlon]

If you've taken sophomore college physics, it's not counter-intuitive at all that an efficient absorber is also an efficient emitter.

Well, kind of

[Anonymous Coward]

Ideally, you would want all of your electron-hole pairs to never recombine (which would keep them from emitting photons). Since that's obviously not possible, this would be the best possible outcome of internal recombination.

Re:Idea

[Daniel_Staal]

Because the light will be of lower energy (and therefore of a different wavelength) than that which the solar cells absorbed.

Basically, instead of heating up, these cells emit the energy in a controlled manner, in semi-directed infrared (probably) radiation. No laws of thermodynamics are being bent: The waste product is just closer to the type of the input than in other solar cells.

You could similarly say that a water turbine is more efficient if it lets water flow out: It is. The water will just have less flow strength than it did when it went in. The difference is what the turbine is collecting as energy. In this case, instead of letting the light 'back up' in the solar cells (as heat), it's released.