"Violating" Einstein's Photoelectric Effect Model - Comments

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ZapperZ
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ZapperZ submitted a new PF Insights post

"Violating" Einstein's Photoelectric Effect Model

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Thank you ZapperZ for a thoughtful insight article! The simplest cases such the one addressed by Einstein are typically the most beautiful and elegant ones. The extensions that comes later such as the electric field effect, heat effect or mutli-photon processes are typically the most labor-intensive less beautiful but technologically important cases.
 
I was wondering if these violations of Einstein's rule could be used to make photo voltaic cells more efficient? Keep in mind that with the concentrated solar principal (more info here http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540856/doe-attempts-to-jump-start-concentrated-solar/ ) acres of mirrors can concentrate light onto a few solar cells. Thank you for your time!
 
There are some ideas how infrared light can get converted to visible light (with sufficient energy per photon to be used by the cell) by combining the energy of at least two photons. The efficiency gain won't be large, but maybe better than nothing.
Mirrors are independent of all those ideas.