MIT Physicists Discovered An Ultra Efficient LED

Some researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s physics department have build an LED (Light Emitting Diode) that produces more electrical energy than it is fed with, making it having electrical efficiency more than 100 percent. And the good thing about this LED is that it doesn’t break the first law of Thermodynamics.

Thermodynamics is “the branch of physical science concerned with heat and its relation to other forms of energy and work.”

The researchers chose an LED that had small band gap and fed it with smaller voltages. Each time of this experiment when the voltage was halved electrical power reduced by a factor of four but light emitted only dropped by a factor of two. The LED produced 69 picowatts of light using 30 picowatts of power, stealing the rest of the energy from its surroundings to create more photons.

MIT researchers involved in this experiment have published their research in a paper published in Physical Review Letters.

They say “Experiments directly confirm for the first time that this behaviour continues beyond the conventional limit of unity electrical-to-optical power conversion efficiency.”

Source:etechmag.com