Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Solid state physics begets both cryogenic technology and cryocooling technology. I wouldn't write off the possibility of making an extremely small cryocooler quite yet. Maybe a pile of solid state heat pumps could do it.

View on HN

This is true, but the fact that heat absorption scales with the surface area is pretty brutal for tiny cooled objects.

Heat conduction also scales with thermal conductivity, which is another thing that advances in solid state can bring us.

This doesn't change the fact that, for any degree of heat conductivity achieved smaller packages will be hard to keep cold than large ones.

It also doesn't change the fact that smaller devices are harder to put wires on - but they're both polynomial scaling factors that other polynomial scaling paradigms could cancel out.

The topic of discussion is datacenter vs. an extremely small cryocooler. What is the other polynomial scaling paradigm that would cancel out the datacenter's advantage?

The effectiveness of thermal insulators and heat pumps. If they make the cost difference negligible then other costs will dominate. We're talking about future decades of material science advancements here, a lot is possible.

Not really. You just have the whole package instead a vacuum casing.

Don't forget about thermal radiation.

Really. Vacuum casing is not even close to sufficient to set heat absorption to zero because of thermal radiation.

And you can't just make the walls reflective once the cold object gets smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. The colder the object, the longer that wavelength.

The way it works is that the entire assembly is in a vacuum. It kinda has to be as any gas which touches it will instantly condense to it or freeze to it. You then have a dual cryostat of liquid helium and liquid nitrogen cooling down the assembly (within the vacuum). The helium and nitrogen cryostat also have a vacuum shield. The nitrogen (liquid at 77K) is a sacraficial coolant which is far cheaper than liquid helium (liquid at 4K) that you need to get to these temperatures. Your're right that thermal radiation is an issue so you have to be careful with the placement of any windows or mirrors around the device.

Souce. I have a PhD in physics where I used equipment cooled to 4K.

Great, then we both have physics PhDs, and you'll know that none of that equipment has, or easily could be, sufficiently miniaturized, which is the topic of discussion ("extremely small cryocooler"). You can't put nested closed dewers of liquid nitrogen and helium on a O(1 mm^2) microchip, and the reason is exactly what I said: it will warm up too fast.

What's wrong with attaching said microchip to a piece of copper for increased size? Genuinely curious.

To be useful in a data center you could cool a slab of copper the size of a fridge and surface mount thousands of chips on it.

The topic is cooling small objects so that personal electronics (e.g., your phone) can compete with datacenters. Cold at scale (i.e., in datacenters) is comparatively easy.

Ah, you're totally right. I misread the OP. Sorry.

No problem :)

What kind of wavelengths are we looking at for the kind of temperatures used in this article?

About 700 micrometers, almost a millimeter. That's from applying Wien's displacement law to the boiling point of Helium.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com