2011/08/31 by Nianbei Li, Jie Ren, Lei Wang +3 · 10 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Acoustic Wave Phenomena Research #Heat flow #Physics #Thermal #Thermal Radiation and Cooling Technologies #Thermal properties of materials #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/revmodphys.84.1045
published as Rev. Mod. Phys. 84, 1045-1066 (2012) · 24 pages, 16 figures, modified title and revised, accepted for publication in Rev. Mod. Phys
arxiv created 2012/03/05 · openalex publication_date 2012/07/17 · arxiv updated 2012/08/21 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The form of energy termed heat that typically derives from lattice vibrations, i.e., phonons, is usually considered as waste energy and, moreover, deleterious to information processing. However, in this Colloquium, an attempt is made to rebut this common view: By use of tailored models it is demonstrated that phonons can be manipulated similarly to electrons and photons, thus enabling controlled heat transport. Moreover, it is explained that phonons can be put to beneficial use to carry and process information. In the first part ways are presented to control heat transport and to process information for physical systems which are driven by a temperature bias. In particular, a toolkit of familiar electronic analogs for use of phononics is put forward, i.e., phononic devices are described which act as thermal diodes, thermal transistors, thermal logic gates, and thermal memories. These concepts are then put to work to transport, control, and rectify heat in physically realistic nanosystems by devising practical designs of hybrid nanostructures that permit the operation of functional phononic devices; the first experimental realizations are also reported. Next, richer possibilities to manipulate heat flow by use of time-varying thermal bath temperatures or various other external fields are discussed. These give rise to many intriguing phononic nonequilibrium phenomena such as, for example, the directed shuttling of heat, geometrical phase-induced heat pumping, or the phonon Hall effect, which may all find their way into operation with electronic analogs.