A magnetic uranium compound has demonstrated to possess extremely strong thermoelectric properties, generating four times the transverse voltage from heat than the previous record in a cobalt-manganese-gallium compound. The discovery will enable material scientists to discover new applications for the actinide elements and direct new research aims in topological quantum materials. Filip Ronning, and his colleagues out of the Institute for Materials Science at Los Alamos National Laboratory, published their research in Science Advances.
"We found that the large spin-orbit coupling and strong electronic correlations in a system of uranium-cobalt-aluminum doped with ruthenium resulted in a colossal anomalous Nernst conductivity," said Ronning. He continued, "It illustrates that uranium and actinide alloys are promising materials to study the interplay among a material's topology and strong electron correlations. We're very much interested in understanding, tuning and eventually controlling this interplay, so hopefully one day we can exploit some of these remarkable responses."
The Nernst response happens when a material converts a flow of heat into an electric voltage. This phenomenon can be exploited in devices that generate electricity from a heat source. The most notable current example is the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) that were developed in part at Los Alamos. The uranium system studied by the Los Alamos team generated 23 microvolts per kelvin of temperature change, four times larger than the previous record for cobalt-manganese-gallium alloy.
Image credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory