Electricity from Heat

[ysabetwordsmith]

A new discovery regarding paramagnons paves the way for harvesting energy from previously wasted sources.  \o/ 

Not mentioned in the article is that this deeper understanding of electromagnetism is also a step toward understanding the unity of energy.  Right now people tend to sort it into different types, but the whole universe is really just one thing -- little whizzing bits of energy with really good imaginations.  The closer you get to the core of that concept, the more power you can obtain.

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More references

[mdlbear]

Paramagnon drag in high thermoelectric figure of merit Li-doped MnTe | Science Advances original paper, by way of
A new way to turn heat into energy, which is the article in OSU's news feed that Science News copied.

I like to track down the original research when I can, even if (as in this case) I don't understand most of it -- a lot gets lost in the popularization process. Magnons turn out to be quasiparticles -- temporary groupings of spins that behave quantum-mechanically like particles. Other quasiparticles include phonons - quantized vibrations - and the electron pairs that cause superconductivity.

Re: More references

[acelightning]

What I want to know is how this is different from thermoelectricity. I remember a picture from the early 1960s, showing how to make a tiny Seebeck-effect DC source with a coffee can, two different types of wire (say, copper and steel), and a candle. This was for powering a short-wave radio receiver for educational use in some underdeveloped country.

(I used to have a small "intended for use in the car" Peltier-effect refrigerator. I wanted to keep in in the computer room so I could keep beverages and snacks cool. But to run off mains power it used a rectifier brick, which produced enough RF interference to mess with my computer. I was tempted to try to run it off a bunch of D cells.)

Re: More references

[zeeth_kyrah]

The difference is, instead of heat making TE devices much less efficient (cancelling the magnetic field through the depolarizing effect of thermal transfer), this discovery means new substances can be explored to improve the effect and increase overall efficiency in TE devices.

Re: More references

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have to wonder if it plays into the T-mem circuits in Terramagne, which is short for thermal memory. They're about 20 years ahead of the curve here, give or take depending on field.

Re: More references

[acelightning]

The theory may be very interesting, but on a practical level, how are we going to build something to do this? You can make something out of scraps picked from a junk pile, and powered by burning buffalo dung, that does something useful - drive a small electrical device. Can we make anything useful that works because of the properties of paramagnons?

Re: More references

[zeeth_kyrah]

From usage, I've inferred that plasmons are basically captured photons, or light-based phonons.. but nobody describes them this way.