Touch the back of a laptop, and the warmth you feel is energy that has already been paid for, processed by chips, and then dissipated as heat. The work by Toshimasa Fujisawa and colleagues, reported in Communications Physics as “Efficient heat-energy conversion from a non-thermal Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid” and summarized in the TechXplore piece “A new approach to energy harvesting opened up by the quantum world,” asks a simple but radical question: what if that waste heat could be turned back i
