Very fine grained dispersed powders can be produced by the use of laser synthesis technology.
[5] Their design uses Fresnel lenses and a solar-pumped NdCrYAG laser to drive a magnesium-based cycle, which produces hydrogen gas as its product.
Powering lasers requires high levels of power, so the inefficiency of PV solar cells (usually less than 27% efficiency) motivates interest in solar pumping of lasers.
There have been proposals to use solar-pumped laser for solar-energy conversion, shown how to efficiently convert solar into electrical energy, taking advantage of laser amplification and intra-cavity use of a low-efficiency converter such as PV cells.
[9] However, current research efforts are focused on combining the output from several smaller concentrators,[10] an approach that is much more achievable.