Related papers: Solar cell as self-oscillating heat engine
Motivated by recent studies on models of particle and heat quantum pumps, we study similar simple classical models and examine the possibility of heat pumping. Unlike many of the usual ratchet models of molecular engines, the models we…
The Iron Sun formed on the collapsed core of a supernova and now acts as a magnetic plasma diffuser, as did the precursor star, separating ions by mass. This process covers the solar surface with lightweight elements and with lighter…
Calculations are made of the energy supplied to the solar wind by the rapid decay of density fluctuations, identified as ion acoustic waves. It is shown that this process supplies an appreciable fraction, perhaps nearly all, of the observed…
Engines are open systems that can generate work cyclically, at the expense of an external disequilibrium. They are ubiquitous in nature and technology, but the course of mathematical physics over the last 300 years has tended to make their…
Magnetic waves are a relevant component in the dynamics of the solar atmosphere. Their significance has increased because of their potential as a remote diagnostic tool and their presumed contribution to plasma heating processes. We discuss…
Spintronics, which aims at exploiting the spin degree of freedom of carriers inside electronic devices, has a huge potential for quantum computation and dissipationless interconnects. Ideally, spin currents in spintronic devices should be…
Hot-carrier solar cells are envisioned to utilize energy filtering to extract power from photogenerated electron-hole pairs before they thermalize with the lattice, and thus potentially offer higher power conversion efficiency compared to…
We propose and analyse an autonomous engine, which combines ideas from electronic transport and self-oscillating heat engines. It is based on the electron-shuttling mechanism in conjunction with a rotational degree of freedom. We focus in…
Photosynthesis is the basic process used by plants to convert light energy in reaction centers into chemical energy. The high efficiency of this process is not yet understood today. Using the formalism for the description of open quantum…
Solar oscillations consist of a rich spectrum of internal acoustic waves and surface gravity waves, stochastically excited by turbulent convection. They have been monitored almost continuously over the last ten years with high-precision…
Identifying the two physical mechanisms behind the production and sustenance of the quiescent solar corona and solar wind poses two of the outstanding problems in solar physics today. We present analysis of spectroscopic observations from…
A solar cell illuminated by circularly-polarized light generates charge and spin currents. We show that the spin polarization of the current significantly exceeds the spin polarization of the carrier density for the majority carriers. Based…
This work introduces solar, a collection of ten optimization problem instances for benchmarking blackbox optimization solvers. The instances present different design aspects of a concentrated solar power plant simulated by blackbox…
A physically consistent model of magnetic field generation by convection in a rotating spherical shell with a minimum of parameters is applied to the Sun. Despite its unrealistic features the model exhibits a number of properties resembling…
The magnetic activity of the Sun, as manifested in the sunspot cycle, originates deep within its convection zone through a dynamo mechanism which involves non-trivial interactions between the plasma and magnetic field in the solar interior.…
We realize a heat engine using a single electron spin as a working medium. The spin pertains to the valence electron of a trapped $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ion, and heat reservoirs are emulated by controlling the spin polarization via optical pumping.…
Stellar magnetic fields are produced by a magnetohydrodynamic dynamo mechanism working in their interior -- which relies on the interaction between plasma flows and magnetic fields. The Sun, being a well-observed star, offers an unique…
This paper gives a personal global point of view on two sciences: electronics and photonics towards plasmonics and solar energy conversion. The new research directions in these two sciences are pointed out by comparison and in the…
Some possible ways of the energy production with fusion reactions in the Sun was explored theoretically in the first half of this century. Nowadays it is a standard view that the Sun produces its energy on a uniform level. I point out, that…
Manipulating the flow of energy in nanoscale and molecular photonic devices is of both fundamental interest and central importance for applications in light harvesting optoelectronics. Under erratic solar irradiance conditions, unregulated…