Researchers have proposed a new device that could capture energy from the infrared emissions the Earth shoots into outer space.
Recent technological advances could allow scientists to transform the imbalance between the Earth and vast vacuum beyond into direct-current (DC) power, a Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science news release reported.
"It's not at all obvious, at first, how you would generate DC power by emitting infrared light in free space toward the cold," principal investigator Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at Harvard SEAS, said in the news release. "To generate power by emitting, not by absorbing light, that's weird. It makes sense physically once you think about it, but it's highly counterintuitive. We're talking about the use of physics at the nanoscale for a completely new application."
"The mid-IR has been, by and large, a neglected part of the spectrum," he said. "Even for spectroscopy, until the quantum cascade laser came about, the mid-IR was considered a very difficult area to work with. People simply had blinders on."
This discovery has led researchers to develop a solar panel that creates electricity by generating infrared light as opposed to visible light.
"Sunlight has energy, so photovoltaics make sense; you're just collecting the energy. But it's not really that simple, and capturing energy from emitting infrared light is even less intuitive," lead author Steven J. Byrnes ), a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS, said in the news release. "It's not obvious how much power you could generate this way, or whether it's worthwhile to pursue, until you sit down and do the calculation."
The device could be paired with a traditional solar cell to maintain the energy production at night without extra installation costs.
"People have been working on infrared diodes for at least 50 years without much progress, but recent advances such as nanofabrication are essential to making them better, more scalable, and more reproducible," Byrnes said.
