Re: All week long (mid dec 2007) I've been hearing about...

Hey Jeff,  

  Yeah, I know a little.  I think it's destined to become the "Presto Rapid Hot Dog Cooker" of energy harvesting.  It may leave a mark upon the industry, but fall a little shy of that competing kitchen appliance -- the microwave oven.

  It's an array of resonant circuits.  In physics, when discussing the nature of the interaction of EM waves with  matter, we analyze the the propagation of light through clean things like glass, by imagining with radio waves interacting with an array of antennas or resonators.  Then we can apply the knowledge we have of the electric wave or photon in the "infinite" matrix.

  While it's certainly possible to produce these arrays with the characteristics needed to be anywhere from transparent to opaque, transmissive to absorptive, the problem still exists on how to rectify the oscillating EM field into useful DC voltage.  

  There are difficulties when trying to extract useful work out of a field oscillating at optical frequencies (10^14Hz)  The losses, proportional to  f^2 * C cause the matrix to dissipate energy as heat, just like you'd expect from a sheet of dark material exposed to sunlight.

  I think it's really cool that the lab has succeeded in replicating such large areas of such tiny structures...  I'm not going to bank on the technology being the next commercial "ceramic magnetron". 

  Nature has provided many natural "structures" that absorb quanta of EM and dislodge electrons.  We call them solar cells.  And while the QM efficiency is close to 100%, the net result in the real world never can be.

  It's not just a matter of making a faster diode ;-)  But separating the "charge" induced on the circuit.  The silicon crystals accomplish this in the PN junction.  The electrons come off the matrix having been lifted across the energy gap, by absorbing the energy proportional to h*f. The antennas do it through phase shifting * coherence effects.  Perhaps they've figured out a way to curb the losses, and suppress tunneling? I don't know, anything is possible, but the quantum world is a strange place!

  Maxwell's Daemon has evaded capture for more than 2 centuries that we've been trying to get him.  Astronomers tell us the daemon has had 15 billion years to perfect his craft...