Scientists defy century-old limit on turning heat into electricity
Scientists from JNCASR, the University of Sydney, and IISc have discovered a crystalline semiconductor that defies the century-old Seebeck effect limit for converting heat into electricity. This breakthrough could lead to advanced temperature sensors and more efficient heat-to-electricity conversion technologies.
Why it matters
This scientific advancement challenges fundamental physics assumptions and has significant implications for energy harvesting and quantum sensing.
Scientists from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in a collaborative research have reversed a limit which was accepted for over a century on turning heat into electricity.
Scientists from the JNCASR, along with the University of Sydney, Australia and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), stumbled on a crystalline semiconductor that converts a temperature difference into an electrical voltage nearly a thousand times larger than textbook physics allows.
“The thermoelectric voltage generated is so large that it rivals values normally seen only in liquid electrolytes and ionic gels, not in solid, particularly single-crystalline materials,” the Department of Science and Technology said.
It added that this discovery overturns a decades-old assumption about the ceiling on this effect in solids and opens a path to a new generation of ultrasensitive temperature sensors, heat detectors, and quantum sensing devices.
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