When topological nodal semimetals are placed in a strong magnetic field, they become very good at converting heat current into electric power. That’s the new result from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who say that the efficiency of these materials in fact becomes much higher than the upper limits known to exist for any other class of thermoelectric material known today.
“This is exciting because if we can get really good at converting heat current to electric power by exploiting the thermoelectric effect, this will allow for a lot of useful technologies,” says physicist Brian Skinner, who led this research effort together with colleague Liang Fu. “For example, we could recover the waste heat from a car engine or a power plant and use this heat to power electrical devices. Or we could make new kinds of refrigerators or heaters that are very efficient and have no moving parts.”
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