Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Just a second!

You changed the experiment so lets add more detail to bring it to what we are after.

i) The room in which our setup is in pitch black.
ii) The cells are producing zero volts obviously there is no light at all.
iii) Each cell is connected to a storage oscilloscope because we are going to have to measure fast.
iv) Our photon source in the middle turns on for one pulse every 10 minutes. This is like you you flicking the dimmest light globe on and off once really really fast in 10 minutes.

Our oscilloscopes will record the response of the solar cells to that one photon every 10 minutes.

The power equations in your post above you refer to are MACRO laws for continuous power situations. Like all such laws you can bend and violate them if you understand what they are really measuring which is what we are trying to do here. Those laws are correct by the way for the macro situation with normal setups but you can bend them with special setups.

We are interested in the behaviour of one photon (the smallest flick on/off) of a light pulse we can make.

So given our complete dark setup what will the oscilloscopes of each cell see in response to the single photon emission every 10 minutes.

Whats your prediction? Our money awaits if you can get it right.

To help I will tell you what doesn't happen which is the logical expectation based on the MACRO laws. Naively we (perhaps it's just me when I first saw this) would expect all the 20 cells to record a fleeting fast voltage spike settling back down to zero as the room goes black again. You might also expect if you took the panels closer to the source you would get higher fleeting voltage spike recorded by the oscilloscopes on each of the 20 cells as you would expect the power to be higher.

HINT THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENS ... our macro laws don't work in this situation. As I said there is a fun version you can do at home which shows the same thing which I will discuss in a minute.

The thing the experiment throws up is what is wrong with the macro laws and what are they based on. I am strictly avoiding giving you any answers just giving you the results for you to work with the raw experiment results with no interpretation. I really want my money if you can solve it.