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Low-temperature physics

Tunnelling into the chill

The trend towards ever smaller electronic instruments had left refrigerators out in the cold. Now a practical, compact device uses quantum mechanical tunnelling to cool close to absolute zero.

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Figure 1: The working principle of the NIS micro-refrigerator devised by Clark et al.1.

References

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Pekola, J. Tunnelling into the chill. Nature 435, 889–890 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/435889a

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