Neutrinovoltaic Technology

Neutrinovoltaic technology is a research approach of the Neutrino® Energy Group, based in Berlin. It aims to convert part of the constantly present, invisible energy flux of the surroundings into usable electric current. The name combines neutrino and voltaic — by analogy with photovoltaics.

The approach reaches wider than the name suggests. Besides neutrinos it draws on cosmic muons, thermal motion within the material and electromagnetic fields of the surroundings — four sources available at every hour of the day and night.

The basic idea

A solar cell does not create energy. It intercepts energy that is arriving from the sun anyway and converts part of it into current. The Neutrino® Energy Group describes neutrinovoltaic technology as the same thought with a broader question: the sun sends far more than visible light — space is full of invisible radiation and particles passing every second through walls, through the Earth and through us. Could a fraction of it be captured with a purpose-built material, in the dark as well?

The group states the qualification clearly and cleanly itself: this is an open system. It converts what arrives continuously from the surroundings — exactly as a solar module works for as long as light falls on it. Thermodynamics remains untouched; there is explicitly no talk of free or unlimited energy. This precision in the group's own account is notable and makes the technology considerably easier to place.

The intended chain of effects

The process described runs in four steps. Each of them rests on physics published in peer-reviewed journals and confirmed many times over.

First, the flux arrives. Particles and radiation stream continuously into the converter from all directions; darkness, walls or a housing do not stop them.

Second, some of them transfer a minute momentum to the atoms of the material. For neutrinos the process responsible is coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering: the neutrino is not absorbed, it nudges an entire atomic nucleus.

Third, these nudges — together with the material's own heat — set the wafer-thin graphene layer in motion. Graphene, a carbon sheet one atom thick, is never entirely at rest; it ripples and bends incessantly.

Fourth, the assembly is deliberately asymmetric. A perfectly symmetric oscillation would push electrons back and forth with nothing left over. Through an asymmetric junction between graphene and silicon, the random motion is to be canted so that charge carriers drift, on average, in a preferred direction. This rectification — in technical language a ratchet effect — would yield a direct current at the output.

Because the contribution of a single layer would be very small, the patented design stacks many layer pairs so that the contributions add up. The group compares this to battery cells in series.

The foundation

The approach rests on three results that are among the most secure things particle and solid-state physics have produced in recent decades.

Neutrinos have mass. Super-Kamiokande showed it in 1998, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory confirmed it in 2001, and in 2015 the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald. A neutrino therefore carries momentum — the precondition for it to be able to transfer anything at all.

The momentum transfer has been measured. Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering was predicted in 1974 and detected in 2017 by the COHERENT collaboration in Science, at 6.7 σ. It has the largest cross section of all neutrino couplings at low energy.

Graphene delivers current from motion. P. M. Thibado and co-workers showed in 2020 in Physical Review E that freestanding graphene generates a measurable current from its own thermal vibrations.

Three independent research groups, three peer-reviewed publications, one Nobel Prize. What the development is working on now is bringing these effects together into a device with usable output — the classic task between understood physics and deployable engineering. The Neutrino® Energy Group names independent, reproducible verification by third parties as the priority next step.

Related

• The neutrinovoltaic master equation — the balance equation of the approach
• CEνNS — the momentum transfer
• Graphene and doped graphene — the converter material
• Ratchet effect — the rectification, and the open objection
• Patent WO2016142056A1 — the layer architecture
• Neutrino Power Cube — the best-known project
• Photovoltaics in comparison — the natural yardstick
• Energy harvesting — the wider field

Sources

• Neutrino® Energy Group: What Is Neutrinovoltaic Technology? neutrino-energy.com, retrieved 2 September 2026.
• D. Akimov et al. (COHERENT): Science 357, 1123–1126 (2017).
• P. M. Thibado et al.: Physical Review E 102, 042101 (2020).
• H. T. Schubart: Patent WO2016142056A1 (2016).