Indian researchers use scandium nitride to break century-old thermoelectric limit
Technology
Indian researchers have pulled off something big: they have broken a 100-year-old barrier in making electricity from heat.
By developing a new scandium nitride (ScN) semiconductor, they managed to go way beyond the usual limits of the Seebeck effect, which is how voltage gets generated when materials have different temperatures.
Magnesium-doped ScN achieves nearly 100x Seebeck
The team tweaked ScN thin films with magnesium, changing how charges move and achieving a Seebeck coefficient nearly 100 times beyond the earlier reported ceiling for crystalline solids.
They even built a photon sensor that turns laser heat into voltage, quickly and reliably.