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Too cool to work

Magnetocaloric and electrocaloric effects are driven by doing work, but this work has barely been explored, even though these caloric effects are being exploited in a growing number of prototype cooling devices.

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Figure 1: Recent electrocaloric1 and mechanocaloric2 prototype coolers.
Figure 2: Caloric materials efficiency map.

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Acknowledgements

X.M. is grateful for support from the Royal Society and EPSRC EP/M003752/1. We thank B. Nair for discussions.

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Correspondence to Neil D. Mathur.

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Moya, X., Defay, E., Heine, V. et al. Too cool to work. Nature Phys 11, 202–205 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3271

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