'Nanorefrigerator' is cooled using sunlight Mar 29, 2012
Researchers in Belgium have drawn up plans for an electronic
"nanorefrigerator" device that is driven by high-energy photons,
and so could potentially be directly powered by the Sun. The
device consists of two electrodes, one of which is cooled by
replacing hot electrons with cool ones via photon absorption.
While this is definitely not the first system that applies the
"cooling by heating" concept, it is the first that can be
applied for a nanosized device, with no moving parts or
electrical input, allowing a lower temperature to be achieved at
the nanoscale. Cooling with heat is not a new idea – the
simplest description of the concept would be "sweating" or more
scientifically evaporative cooling. While physicists have been
using coherent laser light to cool gasses since the 1980s, a
theoretical method for cooling a quantum system with noncoherent
light, by using an "optomechanical device", was proposed only
last year. What Bart Cleuren and colleagues