On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Daniel Rocha <danieldi...@gmail.com> wrote: > Pay attention at this: > > " Experiments directly confirm for the first time that this behavior > continues beyond the conventional limit of unity electrical-to-optical power > conversion efficiency." > > It is above the conventional, not that it produces energy out of nothing. > This is just a way of saying that it exceeded expectation of light emission > for a LED.
Yes. It uses electricity to change heat into light. The abstract: "A heated semiconductor light-emitting diode at low forward bias voltage V<kBT/q is shown to use electrical work to pump heat from the lattice to the photon field. Here the rates of both radiative and nonradiative recombination have contributions at linear order in V. As a result the device’s wall-plug (i.e., power conversion) efficiency is inversely proportional to its output power and diverges as V approaches zero. Experiments directly confirm for the first time that this behavior continues beyond the conventional limit of unity electrical-to-optical power conversion efficiency." however, wouldn't this require a violation of the second law of thermodynamics? Harry
