Researchers at MIT claim to have devised a way to get an LED at very low wattage to emit more power than comes from the original power input. The results were published in Physics Revue Letters. According to the researchers, the LED used small amounts of excess heat to emit more power than directly inputed. The researchers speculate that the heat arises from vibrations in the device’s atomic lattice, which is due to entropy.
The researchers claim that they were able to create a power input scenario in which the light-emitting actually cools the LED slightly, making it operate similar to a thermoelectric cooler.
The cooling is not enough to provide practical cooling at room temperature, but the researchers assert that it could potentially be used for designing lights that don’t generate heat. The device might be used as a heat pump for solid-state cooling applications or even power generation.The low-voltage strategy might theoretically allow for a somewhat arbitrarily efficient generation of photons at low voltages. The researchers hope that the technique might also help test the limits of energy-efficiency electromagnetic communication.
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