From the little research I did, they seem to be similar to photons but not quite there. I ran into it learning about solar panel tech. Basically, photons hitting the silicone in the panel need a bit of help from phonons, and those new perovskite cells don’t. What are phonons and how do they work when it comes to solar panels?
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To explain phonons it is useful to first talk about what a photon is. We typically think of photons as particles of light, little packets or quanta of electromagnetic oscillations.
Phonons are a similar idea, but instead of being quanta of electromagnetic oscillations they are a quanta of vibration. When you have a solid material and you hit one of the particles in it, the forces around it will cause it to vibrate, this vibration travels throughout the solid in a similar way to a particle, this is a phonon.
Now these aren’t ‘real’ particles, you can’t isolate a phonon on its own. They are quasi-particles resulting from the behaviour of many particles acting together in such a way that they behave as if they are passing a particle between them.
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