text: By the first law of thermodynamics, the excitation driving electron generation in both photo- and phonovoltaic cells, i.e., the photon or phonon, must have more energy than the semiconductor band gap. For a PV cell, many materials are available with a band gap () well matched to the solar photon spectrum, like Silicon or Gallium Arsenide. For a pV cell, however, no current semiconducting materials have a band gap smaller than the energy of their most energetic (optical) phonon modes (). Thus, novel materials are required with both energetic optical phonon modes ( meV, e.g., graphene, diamond, or boron nitride) and a small band gap (, e.g., graphene).
  By the second law of thermodynamics, the excitation must be "hotter" than the cell for power generation to occur. In a PV, the light comes from an outside source, for example, the sun, which is nearly 6000 kelvins, whereas the PV is around 300 kelvins. Thus, the second law is satisfied and energy conversion is possible. However, the crystal vibrations driving power generation in a pV are intrinsic to the material itself. As such, they can not be imported from an outside source like the sun, but must instead be excited by some other process until they are hotter than the cell. The temperature of the optical phonon population is calculated by comparing the number of optical phonon to the number expected at a given temperature, which comes from the Bose–Einstein statistics.