SOLAR ENERGY CONVERTER USING SURFACE PLASMA WAVES

Sunlight is dispersed over a diffraction grating (12) formed on the surface of a conducting film (14) on a substrate (16). The angular dispersion controls the effective grating period so that a matching spectrum of surface plasmons (18) is excited for parallel processing on the conducting film. The resulting surface plasmons (18) carry energy to an array (20) of inelastic tunnel diodes. This solar energy converter does not require different materials for each frequency band, and sunlight is directly converted to electricity in an efficient manner by extracting more energy from the more energetic photons.