Tag Archives: University of Michigan

Nanoscale thermal switches

Posted on

Thermal management is of key importance in nanoscale devices that have the bad habit of heating up, thus affecting its performance. Prof. Pramod Reddy (University of Michigan) has a long experience dealing with heat transfer at the nanoscale [1][2].

Recently, at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, they’ve been working in a simple and beautiful idea: a thermal switch that employs nanoscale effects that appear when heat is transferred between two tiny membranes. By bringing a third object (modulator) closer to the membranes, the heat transfer between them can be controlled. What we have here is a multi-body effect  that could be used as an efficient way to actively control of heat transfer at the nanoscale.

This work has been published in Nature Nanotechnology and Prof. Reddy asked us to make this picture to illustrate these promising findings.

Cool, man!

Posted on

[Sorry for the bad joke]

One of the issues of nanocircuits is heat dissipation. As in the macro world, at the nanoscale, it is imperative to find a way to cool circuits. Thanks to a collaboration between the University of Michigan and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, has been proved that a particular arrangement of molecules in nanocircuits, achieves and optimizes molecular termoelectric refrigeration.

This result has been published in Nature Nanotecnology.

Quantized thermal transport: this is big

Posted on

For the first time, a solid proof of the quantized nature of thermal transport in single atom junctions. That’s it.

While quantized electrical conductance was pretty well known and proof for quite a while, quantized thermal transport observation was still slipping away from researchers eyes. Until now.

A group of researchers from Michigan University, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and Universität Konstanz have managed to reach the amazing levels of accuracy and stability this measurement requires.

This changes the game. And we had the opportunity to make this explanatory video for them with the help of Prof. J. C. Cuevas (UAM) and Longji Cui (UMICH). One of those times when your job pays off.