If I had a strong source of radio-frequency photons, can these be converted to electricity like a solar panel does for light?
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It’s the basis for the receiving end of “beaming” power (long distance; not the induction kind used in wireless chargers).
Oh, it’s Rectifying antenna! Phew!
Well y’know, tomato potato
Rectum? Damn near killed 'im!
I like that there’s a direct analog for light and it makes use of semiconductor as well.
It’s all part of the same electromagnetic spectrum.
You can “receive” and therefore energy-harvest infrared with semiconductor antennas and circuits. Still a research thing, but could be an interesting add-on on the back of solar panels one day.
Yes, these devices exist. But, IR is significantly, even several orders of magnitude, less powerful from the sun than visible and UV light. The only applications derive from receiving power from human sources that are bright enough, some examples are here in the other comments.
Even then, I have doubts that human IR emitters produce enough power for anything but the most highly efficiently engineered device, outside of a microwave.
That would be an antenna or a coil, if you’re trying to harvest electromagnetic fields.
You’re thinking of a Rectenna.
Edit: Ignore me, Admiral Patrick beat me to it.
Isn’t this essentially near field charging like Qi Charging?
Also microwave projection is used sometimes for power transfer at a distance (mostly stuff like between mountaintops or islands, also only in clear weather)
The amount of free air loss would be horrific. Spend the money on a subsea power cable at that point.
Russia has entered the chat.
Russia would like to know your location.
Somewhere hereish
can also be wifi harvesting
You mean like…. Inductive power transmission? Like every modern cell phone uses?
It’s been around for quite a while, actually, and chances are solid, you use it every day without realizing it.
Nikola Tesla worked on it because he wanted to create a sort of electromagnetic shield that would prevent any sort of attack. The problem with the shield was it would- theoretically-prevent all the -modern attacks. (It sort of worked. The problem was it required horrible amounts of power, just for a single tower, would require a massive power grid and still had the problem of frying any bit of metal. Details.)
The inductive power transmission actually worked quite well, besides the efficiency involved in the inverse square law.
Which, brings us to the new-modern era, with inductive charging for devices- electric toothbrushes were the first since it let you seal the toothbrush and still charge it- then we see it in RFID type things
the RF powers a chip that modulates the carrier wave and rebroadcasts something different. This is used for access control, mostly, but it was basically the same thing as The Thing- a Soviet era bug in the US’s embassy in Moscow. Located in the seal they gifted. This is also used when you “tap” credit or debit cards.
We also see it while charging phones, or apple watches or anything like that.
The reason it’s all relatively low-power is that as you increase in power, it becomes increasingly inefficient. Horribly so.
Samsung had a remote that did this, actually.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/samsungs-new-eco-remote-charges-via-wi-fi-forget-aa-batteries
