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Low-temperature physics

Tunnelling into the chill

Nature volume 435, pages 889–890 (2005)Cite this article

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.

The French physicist Jean Peltier discovered in 1834 that when an electrical current is passed through a solid-state circuit, heat is in some cases removed. Yet one obvious application, a solid-state micro-refrigerator capable of cooling to cryogenic millikelvin temperatures, has remained science fiction. Writing in Applied Physics Letters, Clark et al.1 report significant progress in constructing such a device.

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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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  1. the Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, PO Box 3500, Tietotie 3, Espoo, 02150, Finland

    Jukka Pekola

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  1. Jukka Pekola
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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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