Scientists Discover New Metal that Conducts Electricity, But Not He...

In an interesting new discovery, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and University of California, Berkeley in the US, have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat, a very useful property which may pave the way for an entirely new direction for thermoelectrics.

The scientists discovered that a new material, Metallic vanadium dioxide, easily carries an electric current, but fails to conduct heat as expected, and has raised expectation that the findings could lead to a wide range of applications, such as thermoelectric systems that convert waste heat, from engines and appliances, into electricity.

A newly discovered material could change the way we look at conductors [Photo Source]

But it seems the results were not what was expected as Junqiao Wu, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a news release

This was a totally unexpected finding. It shows a drastic breakdown of a textbook law that has been known to be robust for conventional conductors. This discovery is of fundamental importance for understanding the basic electronic behavior of novel conductors.

And this "drastic breakdown" of a text book law refers to the "Wiedemann-Franz Law", which states that good conductors of electricity are also good conductors of heat.

Though that is true for most metals, it is not the case for metallic vanadium dioxide (VO2), a material already noted for its unusual ability to switch from an insulator to a metal when it reaches 67 degrees Celsius, opening up a huge area of application.

Berkeley Lab scientists Junqiao Wu, Changhyun Ko, and Fan Yang (left to right), are working on an instrument to determine the amount of tungsten in the tungsten-vanadium dioxide (WVO2) nanobeams. [Photo Source]

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Scientists Discover New Metal that Conducts Electricity, But Not Heat: Introducing Vanadium Dioxide (VO2)