Thomson effect facilitates thermoelectric cooling

Thermoelectric technology is attracting increasing attention due to its application advantages in fields of waste heat recycling and solid-state cooling. Traditional thermoelectric cooling mainly depends on the Peltier effect, but its cooling capacity at cryogenic temperatures has been limited. Recent research conducted by Chen et al. has emphasized the potential of leveraging Thomson effect in thermoelectric cooling to attain substantial temperature drops. While conventional materials exhibit limited Thomson cooling due to insufficient change in carrier entropy, they found the electron phase transition in YbInCu4 directly regulates the entropy of carriers, resulting in a significant enhancement of the temperature-normalized Thomson coefficient. This resulted in a stable temperature difference of over 5 K at about 38 K and a ΔTmax/Thot value of about 15%, comparable to a conventional Peltier cooler at near-room temperatures. Here, we highlight that the approach goes beyond traditional focus solely on increasing ZT, and the results reveal the potential of solid-state thermoelectric cooling in cryogenic applications. Moreover, it opens up possibility of developing more efficient Thomson coolers by investigating other materials with strong electron interactions.