Heat diode effect and negative differential thermal conductance across nanoscale metal-dielectric interfaces

Abstract

Controlling heat flow by phononic nanodevices has received significant attention recently, because of its fundamental and practical implications. Elementary phononic devices such as thermal rectifiers, transistors and logic-gates are essentially based on two intriguing properties: heat diode effect and negative differential thermal conductance. However, little is known about these heat transfer properties across metal-dielectric interfaces, especially at nanoscale. Here we analytically resolve the microscopic mechanism of the nonequilibrium nanoscale energy transfer across metal-dielectric interfaces, where the inelastic electron-phonon scattering directly assists the energy exchange. We demonstrate the emergence of heat diode effect and negative differential thermal conductance in nanoscale interfaces and explain why these novel thermal properties are usually absent in bulk metal-dielectric interfaces. These results will generate exciting prospects for the nanoscale interfacial energy transfer, which should have important implications in designing hybrid circuits for efficient thermal control and open up potential applications in thermal energy harvesting with low-dimensional nanodevices.

Electron and phonon drag in thermoelectric transport through coherent molecular conductors

“…A similar problem has been considered in Refs. [58][59][60][61]. Here we focus on the other situation, where we apply a temperature difference between the two phonon baths [ Fig.…”

Influence of Hot Electron Scattering and Electron–Phonon Interactions on Thermal Boundary Conductance at Metal/Nonmetal Interfaces

“…This suggests an additional channel for thermal transport across interfaces that are solely driven by the scattering of metal electrons on the interface and exchanging energy to the nonmetal substrate. Previous theories on electronphonon scattering cannot account for this electronic scattering mechanism and resulting enhancement in thermal boundary conductance: [15,16,19,24,29] The key to capturing this phenomenon is that the electrons in the metal are highly out of equilibrium with the phonons in the metal and substrate.…”

Nonlinear Heat Radiation Induces Thermal Rectifier in Asymmetric Holey Composites

“…Theoretical models for thermal rectifiers are proposed relying on various mechanisms (Roberts and Walker, 2011), including different temperature-dependent thermal properties between dissimilar materials at a contact (Stevenson et al, 1991;Dames, 2009;Kobayashi et al, 2009), asymmetric design of nanostructure (Wu and Li, 2008;Yang et al, 2009), and quantum thermal systems, such as quantum dots and other quantum heterojunctions (Scheibner et al, 2007;Ruokola et al, 2009;Wu and Segal, 2009;Ren and Zhu, 2013a). Similar concepts are even extended to the spin Seebeck diode and transistor (Ren, 2013;Ren and Zhu, 2013b;Ren et al, 2013), and the multiferroic thermal diode (Chotorlishvili et al, 2015), multiferroic switch and memory .…”