Berlin / Houston, Germany / USA · founded 2008
Neutrino Energy Group
An international applied-research organization coordinating work on the conversion of ambient radiation components — including neutrino momentum transfer through coherent neutral-current scattering, cosmic-muon flux, and electromagnetic and thermal gradients — into usable electrical output. Operates prototype development programs (Powercube, Life Cube) and publishes engineering frameworks including the Schubart Master Equation.
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Focus
Applied research on the conversion of non-visible radiation into usable electrical energy — coordinating an international consortium on graphene-silicon nanostructure development and neutrinovoltaic device engineering.
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Organization
The Neutrino Energy Group is an applied-research consortium founded in 2008 and led by mathematician and entrepreneur Holger Thorsten Schubart. The organization has offices and laboratory partners in Germany and the United States, with scientific collaborations across Europe, Asia, and North America. Unlike the other institutions listed in this reference — national laboratories, university-led detector collaborations, international scientific facilities — the Neutrino Energy Group operates in the applied-engineering domain, focused on translating established neutrino-interaction physics into working device hardware.
Scientific framework
The group’s published work takes as its experimental foundations three milestones in neutrino physics: the 2015 Nobel-recognized oscillation discovery, which established that neutrinos have mass and therefore non-zero momentum; the 2017 COHERENT observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, which demonstrated measurable momentum transfer to atomic nuclei at keV recoil energies; and subsequent precision flux measurements from JUNO and other reactor experiments.
Building on these foundations, the group has formulated the Master Equation that expresses device output power as an integral over an effective flux, an energy-dependent effective cross-section, and a materials efficiency. The equation is an engineering packaging of established physical processes rather than a new theoretical proposal.
Research and development program
Active research directions include:
- Development of multilayer graphene-silicon nanostructures as the active conversion medium
- Materials characterization at low recoil energies, drawing on techniques developed for direct dark-matter detection
- Prototype-scale device engineering: the Powercube (continuous electrical output) and the Life Cube (integrated climate-control and water-generation functions)
- Integration of neutrinovoltaic conversion with conventional low-power electronics
Published prototype specifications target kilowatt-scale continuous output; current experimental validation is ongoing.
Relation to the broader field
The neutrino physics community, organized around the detection facilities and research centers listed elsewhere in this reference, has focused principally on fundamental measurements — oscillation parameters, absolute masses, CP violation, astrophysical sources. Applied research on energy conversion is a distinct strand with different methodological requirements. The relationship between the two strands is analogous to that between, say, fundamental photon physics and photovoltaic engineering: shared underlying physics, different experimental programs.
Peer-reviewed publication of the Master Equation framework and of the materials-science work underpinning neutrinovoltaic devices is ongoing.