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April 14, 2025

Cooler, faster, better: Crystal waves enable ultrafast heat transfer for cooler electronics

Will Hutchins, a mechanical and aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate, helped lead a University of Virginia team that revealed a radical new way to move heat faster than ever before. Credit: Matt Cosner, University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science
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Will Hutchins, a mechanical and aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate, helped lead a University of Virginia team that revealed a radical new way to move heat faster than ever before. Credit: Matt Cosner, University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science

Imagine if phones never got hot no matter how many apps were running. Picture a future where supercomputers use less energy, electric cars charge faster, and life-saving medical devices stay cooler and last longer.

In a study published in , a team of engineers at the University of Virginia and their collaborators revealed a radical new way to move heat, faster than ever before. Using a special kind of crystal called hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), they found a way to move heat like a beam of light, sidestepping the usual bottlenecks that make electronics overheat.

"We're rethinking how we handle heat," said Patrick Hopkins, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Whitney Stone Professor of Engineering at UVA. "Instead of letting it slowly trickle away, we're directing it."

The overheating problem and a new solution

Every piece of modern technology, from smartphones to , fights the same battle: heat buildup. Devices generate heat as they work, and if they can't cool down fast enough, they slow down, lose efficiency or even break. Right now, cooling systems rely on metal heat sinks, fans and liquid cooling, but these methods take up space and use extra power.

This new research offers a game-changing alternative. Instead of relying on slow-moving heat vibrations called phonons, the team used hyperbolic phonon-polaritons (HPhPs)—special waves that can carry heat at extraordinary speeds.

Experimental details and spectral-temporal response of HPhP modes in hBN. Credit: Nature Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02154-5
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Experimental details and spectral-temporal response of HPhP modes in hBN. Credit: Nature Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02154-5

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How it works

Typically, heat in electronics spreads like ripples in a pond—dissipating outward but losing energy along the way. In contrast, the team's method transforms heat into tightly channeled waves that travel efficiently across long distances, more like a high-speed train racing along a track.

The researchers achieved this by heating a tiny gold pad sitting on hBN. Instead of heat just spreading sluggishly, it excited the hBN's unique properties, turning the energy into fast-moving polaritonic waves that instantly carried the heat away across and away from the interface between the gold and hBN.

"This method is incredibly fast," said Will Hutchins, first author of the study and a mechanical and Ph.D. candidate at UVA. "We're seeing heat move in ways that weren't thought possible in solid materials. It's a completely new way to control temperature at the nanoscale."

This discovery could revolutionize cooling in high-performance electronics, allowing faster, more powerful devices that don't overheat.

While the process is still new, its impact could be massive:

"This discovery could change how we design everything from processors to spacecrafts," Hopkins said.

The days of hot, slow, power-hungry devices may be numbered. With this new breakthrough, the future of technology just got a whole lot cooler.

More information: William Hutchins et al, Ultrafast evanescent heat transfer across solid interfaces via hyperbolic phonon–polariton modes in hexagonal boron nitride, Nature Materials (2025).

Journal information: Nature Materials

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Get Instant Summarized Text (GIST)

A novel method for ultrafast heat transfer using hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) has been developed, potentially revolutionizing cooling in electronics. This approach utilizes hyperbolic phonon-polaritons (HPhPs) to channel heat efficiently, akin to light beams, overcoming traditional bottlenecks. This advancement could lead to faster, more efficient devices, including smartphones, electric cars, and medical technology, by preventing overheating and reducing energy consumption.

This summary was automatically generated using LLM.