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New MIT Research Produces “Free Light” From Bulbs

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What if light bulbs were as efficient as they should? There will be those of you who say: “Well, aren’t they already?” Actually… no, they’re not: they demand more electricity that would be needed to produce light and they shed the rest as heat. However, thanks to an MIT research team, that’s all about to change radically: they could give more light than what they receive in electricity (hello, free energy seekers).

The MIT people figured out that feeding fewer volts to the bulb would make the input power drop by a factor of four and the lumen output would follow in a linear way. This fact entails that the bulb will eventually emit more lumens than the energy received, what is actually called “free” light.

So, by using this procedure, the team came up with 69 picowatts of light from 30 picowatts of energy, gathered from waste heat produced by vibrations in the bulb’s atomic lattice. If you’re just waiting to be impressed, don’t be, because even with the helping heat in a room, it only happens when using small amounts of electricity and weak bulbs.

Nonetheless, the process would apply well to any LEDs or light sources that generate only light and no heat, also known as “cold” bulbs. This way, LEDs step up their efficiency as opposed to incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. I guess everyone likes the idea of getting more than they bargained for, right?

[via Gizmodo]

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