MIT Researchers Produce Micro-Light that Outputs More Power Than Applied

[eck]

The title (and the first comment on the link) makes it sound like it's a perpetual motion machine, but as far as I can tell it's more like a tiny heat-pump: energy is conserved, entropy increases. Still kind of neat though.

[Cushman]

Of course they didn't beat thermodynamics, but still, assuming they can scale the tech up to a useful power, it's a light that's also a cooling element. That'd be more than kind of neat, wouldn't it?

[nl]

This is one of the best things I've seen invented in a long time.

It's like a peltier cooler[1], but it produces light instead of heat.

I'm thinking of the most amazing beer cooler/Christmas light display ever!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

[ars]

It does NOT cool things. To use it you have to heat it hotter than wherever it is shining into.

It uses that heat to make light, but it is not a cooler (i.e. a heat pump).

[sageikosa]

Energy input and heat in the "thermodynamic system", versus energy output and heat remaining stays in balance. If energy input (in electric current) is higher than energy output, then heat is added to the system. If energy input is lower than energy output, then heat is lost from the system.

All it takes is the ability to channel some of the light (energy output) away from the reservoir of heat to show that the reservoir of heat will decrease.

Ultimately you'd expect a temperature gradient at the system boundary to start transferring heat back into the system. through the first law of thermodynamics.

[quarterto]

In the UK, a microlight is an ultralight aircraft[1]. This would have been so much more badass.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microlight

[ars]

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3669688

[beej71]

It says it produces too little light for "most" applications... I wonder what the applications actually are!

[frugalfirbolg]

Probably entanglement and other optics experiments if the light produced has the right properties.

[dudus]

I'm pretty sure this is the first step to create an Arc Reactor.

Tony Stark built it in a cave ... with a box of scraps