Experts have recently identified a never-before-seen phenomenon inside carbon nanotubes, which manifests itself through powerful waves of electricity being discharged from carbon nanotubes. The team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers that found this strange occurrence named the phenomenon thermopower waves. They add that it could provide the basis for an entirely new method of producing electrical energy, to be used inside small electronic devices, or maybe even for large-scale applications.

Opening up an entirely new field of research in producing electricity is a very rare event. There are only a few known ways of producing electrical current, and most revolve around driving the blades of a generator using either the power of waves and wind, or heat generated by fossil fuels. Solar cells produce electricity directly, but their output is still minimal. The previously unknown phenomenon is now added to the list. The team behind the investigation, which was led by the MIT Charles and Hilda Roddey associate professor of chemical engineering Michael Strano, says that obtaining electricity in this manner is impossible without the use of carbon nanotubes.

These are submicroscopic structures, just billionths of a meter in diameter, being made up of a honeycomb-like structure. Together with graphene sheets and buckeyballs, carbon nanotubes have been among the most promising and widely researched materials in the world for the past two decades. They hold great promise for a large number of fields of science, including medicine, nanotechnology, geoengineering, biology, and for the electronics industry. The new work on thermopower waves could help this quest considerably, analysts say. Details of the investigation appear in the March 7 issue of the respected scientific journal Nature Materials.

The phenomenon itself is very bizarre, the researchers say. As moving pulses of heat pass through the carbon nanotubes, they also tend to move electrons along. This in turn causes an electrical current to be produced. “There's something else happening here .We call it electron entrainment since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity,” Strano says. The research was funded under grant money secured from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).