Creating the "smallest refrigerator in the world" in America
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, have been able to produce "the smallest refrigerator in the world" that cannot be seen with the naked eye, which could lead to a big leap in the future of refrigeration technology.
In fact, a small refrigerator is a small thermal cooler whose thickness does not exceed 100 nanometers, and one nanometer is equivalent to 0.0000001 centimeters, according to the BGR website.
Although at first the device doesn't seem to have any useful applications in the average home kitchen, it could be a cooling boom for powerful electronic devices, which tend to get very hot.
And the "mini refrigerator" is made using semiconductors capable of heating or cooling according to its orientation and design, and when one side of it is heated the other side becomes cold, and this is very useful in cooling technologies as well as for generating electricity. As for the semiconductors, they are made of bismuth telluride and antimony chips, which have been proven. It's just as effective as it does in conventional applications with much larger components.
The purpose of making a refrigerator this tiny is to get a better idea of how the cooling process works on an incredibly small scale and then use that knowledge to build larger versions that are as efficient as possible, the study authors explain.
"A small refrigerator makes it millions of times faster than a cubic millimeter fridge, and it will actually be millions of times faster than the refrigerator in your kitchen," University of California, Los Angeles, physics professor Chris Reagan, and co-author of the research, explains in a statement.
He continued: "Once we understand how thermoelectric coolers work at the atomic and near atomic level, we can go up to the large range, where the return is large."