naevaTheRat

Just to talk in international units to include everyone: I was under the impression it was supposed to operate at 1 mbar or 1/1000th of an atmosphere. That's into the transition between viscious and molecular flow iirc (for air at normal temps anyway). You're probably still pumping down with something like a scroll pump but it's not very efficient anymore.

Thinking about the number of opportunies for leaks. Every joint, every screw, every pump connection. How they all shift against each other as the sun warms and cools them, how you relieve the strain without introducing pourous materials. It's a fucking nightmare, and even if you manage all that you need to be pumping on it every few meters 24/7 to keep pressures that low with the realistic amount of leaks/in order to be able to pump down the local area where one occurs.

Like imagine if you needed a phat motor on every block to make roads work. The infrastructure demand is just unreal

An incomplete but better than most pop science explanations is as follows: Suppose I have 2 envelopes and 2 letters. We have a stamp that has A and B on it next to each other. Without looking we put the letters next to each other, randomly Orient the stamp and apply it. Then we fold the letters up and put them in the envelops. Now we look at the stamp as see it has A and B on it.

We know that one letter contains A and the other B but not which, you take one and fly to Siberia while I enjoy a nice holiday in Tasmania (sorry but this is the sacrifice of science). I open my letter and see a B, instantly I know that in Siberia there is a letter containing A.

Light speed etc isn't violated here because we travelled below light speed when setting it all up, I haven't affected your letter just gained some insight about the overall system by inspecting one part of it.

Now there are a lot of things I've glossed over but it's much closer to opening letters than psychic woo particles.

edit: as to keeping them latched it's hard. The coupling is like conservative laws (e.g. spin up and spin down so no net overall spin) but any interactions destroy the coupling (or rather extend it to whatever just might've swapped spin with a particle). AFAIK nobody has maintained a system over lightyears for that reason among many, but like shipping pineapples to England the barrier appears practical rather than theoretical.

It's very rude to just swear at someone who hasn't done anything to you. You don't seem very nice.

I'm still confused though, if someone ate some mercury because they bit down on a thermometer or something should their mercury poisoning not be diagnosed as mercury poisoning? should it not be treated the same way?

I used to work in a vacuum lab and one thing to consider is pumping efficiency drops as pressure drops. So everything leaks all the time right, and one strategy is to just pump harder.

However at low pressurers nothing is pushing the air into the pump for extraction, something like a bend can stop gas flowing around it dramatically where in high pressure the gas behind just pushes it through. So it gets more and more energetically demanding to keep pace with leaks.

Also pressuring a giant tube to multiple atmospheres also sounds like a nightmare. It's hard enough to keep pool toys inflated :p

So you say the difference is some moral deficiency? ok well why don't we try and treat that. After all we need pain killers in medicine and we want to make them as safe as possible.

Let's call junkeyism a disease and see how we can stop it happening. Maybe by understanding if some people respond better or worse to different kinds of drugs, maybe we could identify a test we could do to work out what would be safe for someone?

Like what do you think it means when a doctor calls something a disease? People can make bad decisions and still get diseases. If inject yourself with the blood of everyone you meet you'll eventually get a few, they don't stop being a disease just because you gave it to yourself (and also we might ask why someone felt compelled to do something so foolish and could we have helped them).

2 people take the same dose of heroin, they repeat the experience 5 times each on the same time line. Lets say they both has the same surgery. One person stops easily, experiencing mild withdrawal that feels like a flu and goes on with their life without ever thinking about it again. The other feels a powerful compulsion to take more, they maintain their usage say initially through extending a medical script and later the black market.

What was different between the two? Maybe you think person 2 had terrible moral character but if they had never been given heroin this would never have manifested. We call that pathological difference a disease and try and treat it. What would you call it?

I literally just said vegan was a green flag in someone for me and it made people mad.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Starwars is RA Salvatore for people embarrassed about liking elves rendered into a film. All of the artistic stuff is just lifted from Kurosawa, watch those films instead they're actually good.

I'm not sure I understand the confusion. The material thickness does matter in that thinner materials will resist current flow due to a lack of charge carriers meaning each must travel faster, which means that more charge separation is required for a given recombination rate or current.

If the charge required is too high (more than the potential difference across the depletion zone) then the build up will prevent charge separation after excitation. They will recombine in the depletion zone making a bunch of heat and burning out the cell.

Maybe that's the thing? super thin films under too much irradiation or load cooking themselves due to inability to move excited charges away fast enough?

The electrons are all already in the material. They are never created or destroyed just paired and unpaired with holes.

This video might help? from approx 5 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfP5YdJn-c4

The energy comes from the sun, it excites electrons and holes, causing the cell to hold a small charge, that charge is the potential energy that drives the circuit. It is depleted by electrons flowing back into the P side from the circuit, they cannot go from the N side because of the field across the depletion zone. Recombinant electrons from the circuit can then be excited again, excess electrons in the N side flow out of the silicon into the load so that electrons can move from the load into the P side.

This all happens at once. In a very long time, eventually the very same electron that was originally excited by a photon will recombine in the depletion layer. There isn't any loss here.

So on the arse ends of the junction are little wires (one transparent). If you leave the panel in an open circuit the carriers will separate till the charge build up overcomes the depletion zone field and no more charge separation happens during excitation.

In this configuration the cell is essentially a capacitor.

If you close the circuit the P side of the electric field will propagate through the circuit and the load, pushing charge carriers through the load, out the other end, and into the P side of the junction where they combine with the separated holes.

The electrons are being replaced, otherwise the system would become charged over time. They go the long way round the P side of the junction and bond with a hole again in the depleted region.

Solar cells do deteriorate over time but it's not due to use, or not directly. The structure of various parts gets damaged through lattice migration due to heat/thermal cycling, UV radiation and higher can cause excitation to reactive states that damage crap, dopants can migrate around over time (like how carbon can leech from steel) and reduce the conductive efficiency etc.

I think this might be what you're confused by? there are a finite number of available charge carriers in the depletion region and damage to the region uses them up, but it's not because they're used up it's because of structural and chemical changes caused by damage that occurs due to the environment.