Marin Soljacic, PhD

Wireless transmission of electricity sounded commercially unlikely until researchers at Intel, this past August, made a 60 watt light bulb glow from a power source that was three feet away.  Last year, a team at MIT first demonstrated this phenomenon, which they called “WiTricity,” based on two electric coils of the same frequency resonating to transmit energy from one to the other over a distance.  The greater the distance, the lower the efficiency for energy transmission, but the MIT team, under Marin Soljacic, showed they could achieve 90% efficiency over three feet (somewhat better than Intel’s demonstration).  Besides recharging laptop computers from a nearby transmitter, this offers a possibility, some day, of wirelessly recharging pacemakers and other implantable medical devices.    MORE