We can use light to communicate and also we can use the light to generate power. I am talking about Solar power. The light is powerful we can manipulate that power to generate electricity using solar panels. Solar panels are using the fact that light particle or a PHOTON can excite an electron from its ground state to upper state which is excited state. We know that electricity is simply the movement of electrons.
So if a photon can knock out electron forcing it to move to another state we have generated electricity. By using solid state physics we know that if we make a P-N junction using Silicon (sand) we can achieve that. We will let the photon to force the electrons in the junction and we will collect those electrons on the other side and that is electricity generation.
But solar power is not that powerful i hear you say!! Silicon based solar panels are not efficient. The Light spectrum is huge and silicon cover a tiny amount of that spectrum. It is all about how much the material can absorb that light. So new material with larger spectra range of absorption are being investigated to improve the solar capture.
Hopefully in the near future we can harvest the majority of solar light we will solve all our Energy problems....
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