Tiny silicon refrigerator at -273 below zero

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...mg18624976.200

I hope we will be hearing more about this in the near future, give an efficiency of 30%, it would take about 200 W to chill a processor to about -50. Bring it on!

Tiny refrigerators have been made that reach temperatures as low as 0.1 kelvin. Joel Ullom at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues at NIST and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana built the coolers from a sandwich of a metal, an insulator and a semiconductor.

As a result of the quantum tunnelling effect, applying a voltage to the sandwich forces energetic electrons to move out of the metal across the insulating layer and into the semiconductor. someone should try this with a cheese sandwich. That cools the metal to extremely low temperatures. The team has managed to mount four coolers on a silicon chip coated in silicon nitride.

From issue 2497 of New Scientist magazine, 30 April 2005, page 24

Getting something that close to abslute zero is amazing (why youd want anything quite that cold im not sure - theres probably plenty of interesting science to discover though), lets hope this is one day practical for cpu cooling.