Physicists Have Identified a Metal That Conducts Electricity But Not Heat

"It shows a drastic breakdown of a textbook law that has been known to be robust for conventional conductors."

This was published in 2017, but it's new to me. Heat is the bane of all things electrical - particularly electronics. And intermittent problems are the worst.

Fiona McDonald at Science Alert has the details:

"Researchers already knew of a handful of other materials that conduct electricity better than heat, but they only display those properties at temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero, which makes them highly impractical for any real-world applications.

Vanadium dioxide, on the other hand, is usually only a conductor at warm temperatures well above room temperature, which means it has the ability to be a lot more practical.

To uncover this bizarre property, the team looked at the way that electrons move within vanadium dioxide's crystal lattice, as well as how much heat was being generated.

Surprisingly, they found that the thermal conductivity that could be attributed to the electrons in the material was 10 times smaller than that amount predicted by the Wiedemann-Franz Law.

The reason for this appears to be the synchronised way that the electrons move through the material.

"The electrons were moving in unison with each other, much like a fluid, instead of as individual particles like in normal metals," said Wu.

For electrons, heat is a random motion. Normal metals transport heat efficiently because there are so many different possible microscopic configurations that the individual electrons can jump between.

"In contrast, the coordinated, marching-band-like motion of electrons in vanadium dioxide is detrimental to heat transfer as there are fewer configurations available for the electrons to hop randomly between," he added."

The 17th century astronomer & mathematician, Johannes Kepler, once wrote, "Science is the process of thinking God's thoughts after Him." The learning never stops because God has an infinite mind; humans don't.  Wiedemann-Franz was a venerable 'Law' of conductivity. Now, it's not.
Research & discovery is always the hallmark of Science. 'Settled' ain't a thing in science. It's a political narrative.


H/t: Isegoria