We all know about Johnson noise in resistors. It’s real. We can even measure it with a basic low-noise circuit. For a 50 ohm resistor, the voltage noise is ~0.9 nV/rootHz at room temperature. The voltage scales as the root(R), so a 5K resistor has ~9nV/rootHz, and so on. That said, the noise power is the same for every resistor, because as resistance and noise voltage increase, the noise current correspondingly decreases, resulting in the same noise power for any resistance.
Now for the thought experiment. We have a 5K resistor (any resistance will do) at room temperature (RT), and another 5K resistor in a fridge. For simplicity, we’ll assume it’s a very good fridge, at 0 Kelvin inside temperature. In practice it could easily be at the temperature of liquid helium, for example, and the thought experiment would not really be altered, but for simplicity we’ll imaging a fridge producing very close to 0 Kelvin.
We then electrically connect our RT resistor to our 0 Kelvin resistor. What happens? Presumably, the total noise voltage is 9nV/rootHz, from the 5K RT resistor. Let’s assume a bandwidth of 100 MHz, so the actual noise voltage is 9E-9 x root(1E8) = 90 uV RMS.
The total circuit resistance is 10K, so the current is 90uV/10K = 9nA.
The curious thing (to me) is that apparently electrical power is being delivered from the warm resistor to the cold resistor. The power being delivered is (9nA)^2 x 5K = 4E-13W = 0.4pW. Alternatively, we could note that the 2 resistors form a voltage divider, so half of the noise voltage ends up across the cold resistor, so the power delivered is (45uV)^2/5000 = 4E-13W, the same answer as it must be. This is the maximum power that can be transferred, because we have matched the load resistance (5K) to the source resistance (5K) We would get exactly the same amount of power delivered to the cold resistor independently of the actual resistances. They could both be 5 ohms, 5Kohms or whatever.
The exact amount of power delivered is not important, it’s small, but is real. OK, so I’m sitting inside this fridge and getting cold. That free 0.4 pW is useful, but I would prefer more. What is the limit? A million such resistors would certainly be possible, remembering that there is nothing in the Johnson noise math that says anything about the physical size of each resistor. With sufficient miniaturization, even a million million (1E12) such micro-resistors should be possible, so our 0.4pW becomes 0.4W. At such miniaturization, bandwidth could easily be 10GHz rather than 100Mhz, gaining another factor of x10 in power, for 4 Watts. Presumably, when this experiment is performed, heat has to constantly flow from the hot environment, into the hot-resistor ‘power station’, and is then delivered as useful electrical power to the person living in the fridge.
Is there a theoretical limit to how much electrical power can be harvested via Johnson noise in this way? Or is there some reason that I have missed why this doesn’t work in the first place?
In principle we can apparently harvest significant electrical power in this way But can such power ever be useful for anything other than driving millions of tiny electric heaters, that are themselves at lower temperature than the hot ‘generator’ resistors? Can we generate ‘useful’ electrical power in this way, for example, can we obtain our 4W as 4V at 1A, by series/parallel connection of the millions of wires coming out of the ‘hot-resistor-power-station’? I’m sure that John Heath (or Zeranin) would patiently and happily solder up the 1E12 wires if the result was ‘free power’. Will this work?
Here it seems that Mother Nature is most unkind for when multiple hot resistors are wired in series or parallel, the noise power available from the multiple resistors is no greater than the power available from a single resistor, essentially because of the random nature of the noise voltages, that add in RMS fashion rather than algebraically. So unless we have some method of converting the output of each hot resistor to DC, in which case we can series/parallel successfully, we can never produce a useful amount of thermally generated Johnson electrical power. Bugger! Mother Nature thwarts us yet again. If we were ever successful, we would violate the second Law of Thermodynamics, because we would be able to extract useable electrical power from a constant-temperature hot environment, and that is prohibited by Law. I’m not a Law Breaker myself, but I know that JH would like to be.
Are there other volt-nuts out there that think about this sort of thing?