Fun fact: Solar cells and the LEDs are the same element.
If you wire up a solar cell like an LED, it glows dimly in infrared. QA uses this to diagnose dysfunctional wafers.
If you wire up a solar cell like an LED, it glows dimly in infrared. QA uses this to diagnose dysfunctional wafers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BM7VDOoFIWI
The LED is the component on the left; there's a very dim flash (pretty much just the black die turning red) at around 11s, then every few seconds.
I can't remember exactly how it works... I think there's two capacitors charged up to the voltage of the LED in parallel through high-value resistors, and a circuit that shorts the +ve of one to the +ve of the other to put them in parallel.
It only just works at a very specific light level. IIRC some of the transistors are used as very low leakage diodes rather than transistors, as the regular diodes I had we're too leaky.
This should be called a Goku circuit. Kaaaamaaaaikaaaaaa.
In the solar world they call it a blocking diode.
Or you could buy a lithium-ion battery off the shelf today at 95% round trip efficiency and low self discharge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_efficacy#Lighting_eff...
Another piece to think about is density. Even with these losses.. how much energy can a material hold in terms of pure light? Is there a limit to how much light can pass through a material?
And I wonder if you could slow the light down even further, maybe 2 or 3 more orders of magnitude..
Isn't that one of the possible uses for superconductors tho?