We’ve run into a problem in our investigations of alternative renewable energy sources, and we need your help to work it out.
What Happens When You Build a Diode?
If you start with a semiconductor p-n junction diode, you get a depletion region, where holes and electrons separate, leaving a region with net fixed charges and a charge gradient with a corresponding voltage or potential difference. A couple of key points about the depletion region:
- it forms from thermal energy of the conductors in the silicon lattice; and
- for garden variety diodes, the voltage drop is between 0.5 to 1.0 V.
So, why couldn’t you connect a bunch of diodes together to make a battery?
In fact, I remember asking this when I was an undergrad in electrical engineering and computer science – what happens to that potential difference – why can’t I measure it with a voltmeter? And furthermore, why can’t I hook up a bunch of these things in series and make myself a little battery? That would be cool. And it would just run from the ambient thermal energy in the environment – no need for charging. But there are a couple of problems with this idea. First, the number of electrons involved in a single diode is really small. Second, the contact potentials from the different materials involved makes the physics very hard to sort out. One really could never make such a machine. Not to mention the fact that if you could hook a bunch of diodes together to form a battery you would be in severe violation of one of the most dearly held laws of modern physics…
A Thought Experiment
OK, not afraid of breaking laws (we do that all the time in our cars anyway…) we wondered what might happen if we played with the geometry a bit. If you bend the diode around into a new geometry like shown here, what do you get in the gap? Well if you remember Kirchhoff’s Loop Rule (the same as Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law, just a little more general), you have to get an electric field there. In fact, the potential difference from one face of the gap to the other must exactly match the potential drop across the diode depletion region. This actually gets kind of scary, because the smaller you make the gap, the more intense the electric field – and the greater the energy in the gap -becomes. Second, this device is a charged energy-laden capacitor, powered purely by heat – no battery required!! Heat to Electricity. Why is that scary? Think about it!
Anyway – rather than run away from what we knew could not be true (after all, we have been taught about these things in science class since we were little – not just since receiving our Ph.D.’s in physics from UC Irvine or mathematics from Berkeley…), we decided to take a real risk, and put our reputations, research time and money on the line to see where things would all fall apart. This simply could not be true, and we’re determined to find the answer.
Start Computing
So, we did more theoretical calculations and modeled the system with state of the art multiphysics software (Silvaco/Atlas). We even hired experts from Silvaco (at $1,000/day) to check our results. And they came up with the same thing. To our dismay, no matter how we looked at it, the electric field had to be in that gap, and its strength had to be inversely proportional to the gap width. The narrower the gap, the stronger the electric field (at least subject to dielectric breakdown, or ‘bleeding’ of the field into the bulk crystal) and the greater the energy! We must have done something wrong. Because if we had not made a mistake, it might mean our whole culture’s belief system about how the universe operates would have to be fundamentally altered. People with large intellectual and financial investments in the status quo would be seriously bummed out. And the implications of actually being able to harvest mechanical energy from that intense electric field would tax the imagination. It would be recyclable energy. This would be the stuff of science fiction.
So what would we have to do next?
Build a model and test it
We scraped together all the money we could find (under mattresses, from our bank and retirement accounts, small research grants – over $200,000 over 10 years) to do some experiments. (Thanks, Dad!). Thinking that we might somehow have been wrong in the results of our calculations, we expected to find no electric field in that physical gap. In fact, several years ago a prestigious physics journal outright rejected our prediction of these fields. The reviewers, knowing the possible implications of our work refused to support publication of these theoretical and numerical results. They were unable to suspend disbelief and look at these ideas on their own merit.
Most recently (Summer 2010), we spent $30,000 fabricating our test diodes with vacuum gaps (the technology being the same as that used to produce silicon computer chips), and we probed them with both a Scanning Kelvin Probe Microscope and Electric Field Microscope (both of which are applications of Atomic Force Microscopes) at the Stanford Nanocharacterization Lab in Palo Alto, and the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque.
And we found the gap electric field, just as predicted!
- It was where it should be.
- It was very intense – over a million volts per meter.
- It was also – as predicted – rechargeable!
And if that field is really there, what should prevent us from taking advantage of the mechanical force associated with field to harvest its energy in a recyclable manner? (After all, since electric fields exert pressures and forces, could they do pressure-volume work like a gas-piston engine?)
The Second Law of Thermodynamics – That’s What!
If you have been paying attention, and got at least a C in your basic physics or thermodynamics courses (we know who you are!!), you already know the problem with all of this. If we could actually build a device that could convert low-quality thermal energy (heat) into high-quality mechanical or electrical energy, we would be doing so in direct violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (SLT). And everyone knows this is impossible. We know it’s impossible. Many scientists over the last 150 – really over the last 2,000 – years have hung their heads in shame trying to come up with workable challenges to the Second Law, only to find it intact and victorious, preventing any real, fundamental change in how we might do energy research in this age of fossil fuels and global warming.
We know it’s impossible to violate the SLT. It’s never been done. Not a single time. But let’s just suspend our disbelief for a moment, and just imagine…
What if the Second Law were not a ‘law’ at all, but rather a ‘general principle’?
Over 150 years ago, when Carnot, Clausius and Lord Kelvin were originally formulating the SLT, there was no theory of electromagnetism. There was no quantum mechanics, no theory of relativity, not even a Bohr model for the atom with protons and electrons. There were no airplanes, no telephones, no radio. No computers, no movies, no rocket ships, no interplanetary or interstellar probes. No theory of germs or evolution. How much do we take for granted today, that in their day, people said was impossible?
The great enemy of the truth is often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth –persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought…” – John F. Kennedy
- What if the SLT were not an absolute prohibition?
- What if SLT were more of an operating guideline for nature rather than an absolute law?
- What might the consequences be?
Why this website?
The truth is, we need help. We need financial help, scientific help and political help. We’ve worked out of pocket for nearly a decade, and with the help of a couple of small research grants; we’re out of money. We’ve had good success at publishing articles that poke at the fringes of SLT, but direct thrusts to its heart have thus far been thwarted by the high priests of the religion called ‘Big Science’. This website is our first attempt at building a broad base of support for a world in desperate need of new – radically new – approaches to our energy and environmental problems.
Our next nanofabrication will cost at least $40,000, and we’re fresh out of mattresses to raid! So, soon, but not yet, we’ll be asking for your help to finish the job. We’re offering you the opportunity to get involved in something real with a tremendous potential to change everything.
What will you get from your support?
You’ll get a seat at the table
First, you’ll be directly involved in one of the great scientific adventures of our time, and one whose stakes could hardly be higher.
Second, you’ll be first in line when we have a real, legal prospectus and offering of shares. The only thing we can legally do is to promise to notify you when we open up our doors for real investment when the time comes. But the truth is at this point we would much rather spend any money we can raise now on getting the scientific job done, rather than on a ton of legal fees.
You can be a development partner
Of course, maybe you’re associated with a company that has some resources to invest in a project like this. Or perhaps you’re an already tenured professor who can take a risk. The more people we can get involved in this development, and the more resources we can pour into it, the sooner we might actually be able to do something beneficial for the planet.
Could this change the world?
Well, if it turns out that the Second Law can be broken, then a floodgate of research and development dollars will open into this new alternative renewable energy technology. Recyclable energy. If all we did was point the way to an inexhaustible, clean, limitless energy source, we’ll be pretty happy.
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