Researchers have accomplished the incredible feat of controlling heat with a magnetic field.
The study is the first ever to prove that acoustic phonons (particles responsible for the transmission of both sound and heat) contain magnetic properties, The Ohio State University reported. The team of researchers demonstrated that a magnetic field about the size of an MRI was able to reduce the amount of heating flowing through a semiconductor by about 12 percent.
"This adds a new dimension to our understanding of acoustic waves," said Joseph Heremans, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology and professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State. "We've shown that we can steer heat magnetically. With a strong enough magnetic field, we should be able to steer sound waves, too."
Both heat and sound are expressions of the same form of energy, so a force that controls one should actually be able to control the other as well. Heat and sound are both caused by the vibrations of atoms at different speeds.
The findings suggest that materials such as glass, stone, and plastic could be controlled with ultra-powerful magnets. The method would most likely not be applicable to metals because they transmit so much heat through electrons that phonons would not be able to compete.
This discovery will not be applicable in the near future because 7-tesla magnets like the ones used in the study are not available for commercial used and semiconductors must be chilled to nearly absolute zero in order to make the atoms slow down enough to be detectable.
In the future the researchers plan to determine whether or not they can deflect sound waves sideways using these powerful magnetic fields.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Materials.
