PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

10-Sep-2014

Contact: Herb Booth hbooth@uta.edu 817-272-7075 University of Texas at Arlington @utarlington

A team of researchers has discovered a way to cool electrons to 228 C without external means and at room temperature, an advancement that could enable electronic devices to function with very little energy.

The process involves passing electrons through a quantum well to cool them and keep them from heating.

The team details its research in "Energy-filtered cold electron transport at room temperature," which is published in Nature Communications on Wednesday, Sept. 10.

"We are the first to effectively cool electrons at room temperature. Researchers have done electron cooling before, but only when the entire device is immersed into an extremely cold cooling bath," said Seong Jin Koh, an associate professor at UT Arlington in the Materials Science & Engineering Department, who has led the research. "Obtaining cold electrons at room temperature has enormous technical benefits. For example, the requirement of using liquid helium or liquid nitrogen for cooling electrons in various electron systems can be lifted."

Electrons are thermally excited even at room temperature, which is a natural phenomenon. If that electron excitation could be suppressed, then the temperature of those electrons could be effectively lowered without external cooling, Koh said.

The team used a nanoscale structure which consists of a sequential array of a source electrode, a quantum well, a tunneling barrier, a quantum dot, another tunneling barrier, and a drain electrode to suppress electron excitation and to make electrons cold.

Cold electrons promise a new type of transistor that can operate at extremely low-energy consumption. "Implementing our findings to fabricating energy-efficient transistors is currently under way," Koh added.

Read more from the original source:

UT Arlington research uses nanotechnology to help cool electrons with no external sources